Last Orders

CHAPTER 21

Saul Goldman snuggled the Panzer IV into a corner so it was shielded by a house on one side and a stone wall in front. He wasn’t just worried about the pro-Hitler panzer crews from his regiment. Some of the Waffen-SS men who’d failed to protect their precious Führer drove Tigers. It would have taken a lot more stone than was in that wall to shield the Panzer IV from one of their rounds.

His family lived only a few kilometers away. He hoped they were all right. Hope was all he could do right now; he hadn’t yet dared go see them. The Salvation Committee hadn’t done anything about the Nazis’ anti-Semitic laws, but no one on that side went around screaming The Jews are our misfortune! Still, he wasn’t just a Jew. He was a Jew with a murder charge hanging over his head.

But, no matter what else he was, he was also a German soldier fighting for the people trying to overthrow the Nazis. No matter what he did with the rest of his life, the way it looked to him was that he could live a long time on the credit he was piling up in these few hectic days.

If he could live at all. Hermann Witt spoke a warning to the crew: “Keep an eye peeled for ordinary infantrymen, too. A lot of the clowns they’ve got around here still think they ought to be going Sieg heil!”

“That goes double for you, Sergeant,” Saul said. “You’re the one who’s got to keep sticking his head up out of the cupola to find out what’s going on.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Witt told him. “You tend to your job, and I’ll tend to mine.”

“Yes, Mommy,” Saul said sweetly. Everybody in the panzer laughed. Everybody knew he was kidding on the square just the same.

“I only wish the two sides had different colors,” Kurt Poske said. “I hate the idea of shooting at somebody who’s with us by mistake.”

All the panzer crewmen agreed with that. Even Theo nodded. But Sergeant Witt said, “What can you do?” and no one had a good answer for him. The Salvation Committee’s colors were black, white, and red, just like the Nazis’. The Nazis, of course, slapped swastikas all over everything. The Salvation Committee had gone back to the flag of the German Empire, a horizontal tricolor.

Saul did think the Salvation Committee was smart to steer clear of the Weimar Republic’s black, gold, and red. Few Germans had happy memories of the Republic. If more had been happy with it, Hitler wouldn’t have found it so easy to overthrow.

And, of course, if more people had been happy with the present regime, Hitler would still be running things. But the German generals, faced with the idea of a two-front war against two industrial powers that each outclassed and outmanned the Reich (plus England and France, which between themselves and their colonies also outproduced and outmanned Germany), decided that they had to find a peace even if-especially if-Hitler didn’t want to.

Out of nowhere, Theo spoke up: “You know what’s really crazy?”

“You mean, besides you?” Saul said. He couldn’t let something so unusual pass unremarked.

Theo ignored him. “What’s really crazy is, so many stupid fools want what’s left of the Nazis to keep running things.”

Weeks went by when Theo didn’t say so much of his own accord. He’d hit on something important here, though, or Saul thought he had. Everything Hitler had done since the war started had pushed Germany straight toward the cliff. The Wehrmacht hadn’t taken Paris. France fought on. So did England. Joining Poland’s war against Russia hadn’t knocked out the Bolsheviks. Now the Reich was falling back or being driven back on all fronts. Why would anybody with a working set of marbles want to see more of that kind of performance?

“Hello!” Witt said suddenly. “We’ve got what looks like a couple of companies of foot soldiers moving across our front. Now-which side are they on?” Saul couldn’t see them from the driver’s seat; the stone wall blocked his view. After a moment probably spent raising binoculars to his face, the panzer commander grunted. “Ha! They’ve got swastika armbands! Kurt! Canister!”

“Canister!” Poske echoed. After a couple of seconds, the round clanged into the breech. The loader had to reach down and out to grab it, then bring it back and slam it home. The panzer carried only a handful of canister rounds. The crew didn’t need them very often, and naturally stowed them in the most out-of-the-way ammunition racks.

When you did fire one, though, it could do horrible things. The panzer’s canister rounds were basically 75mm shotgun shells. They were full of lead balls, and at short range they could ruin a crowd like nothing else on God’s green earth.

The turret traversed a little. The gun came down to shoot just over the wall. “Fire, Lothar!” Witt yelled. “They know we’re here. The motion must’ve tipped them.”

“On the way!” Lothar Eckhardt said, and the gun boomed. Then the gunner muttered, “Oh, dear Lord!” Saul couldn’t see what the round had done to the pro-Nazi foot soldiers, but that told him everything he needed to know.

Almost everything-a second later, a rifle round rang off the turret. It hadn’t a hope in hell of punching through, but it showed the canister shell hadn’t killed or maimed all the Landsers out there or broken their spirits.

“Another round of the same, Kurt,” Witt said, and then, “Lothar, while he’s loading it hose ’em down with the turret machine gun.”

“Another round of canister,” Poske said at the same time as Eckhardt was replying, “I’m doing it, Sergeant.”

As the MG-34 mounted alongside the panzer’s big gun spat death, Saul wondered how many times they’d chewed up Russians like that. Quite a few, even if he couldn’t put an exact number to it. No matter how often it was, he’d never imagined they would be using the machine gun the same way against rebellious German soldiers.

No, that isn’t right, he thought as the cannon roared again. We’re the rebellious German soldiers. He grinned ferociously, liking the idea.

Then Sergeant Witt spoke to him: “Back us out of here, Adi. I don’t want them coming through the house and jumping us with grenades or Molotov cocktails. Let’s get out into the open, where we can see trouble coming.”

“Backing us out, Sergeant.” Saul put the panzer into reverse. Ivans who drove T-34s often carried a mallet to whack the shift lever and make the transmission do what they told it to. German engineering was of a higher order … even if the USSR kept turning out ungodly swarms of crude but deadly panzers.

After Saul had backed away, Witt sent the panzer out around the end of the wall. That showed Saul what the two rounds of canister had done to his countrymen. Even if they were committed Nazis, the sight made him gulp. The only difference between Russians and Germans after they got blasted to pieces and strings was the color of the bits of unbloodstained cloth covering corpses and bits of corpses.

More bullets rattled off the panzer, these probably from a submachine gun. Theo fired a quick burst from the bow machine gun. He raised the thumb on his left hand, which told Saul they wouldn’t need to worry about that fellow till the Judgment Day.

“Good job,” Witt said. “I don’t think this mob will give us any more trouble, anyhow. Any orders on the radio, Theo?”

“Nope,” Hossbach answered laconically.

“On my own. I wonder if I can stand that much freedom.” The panzer commander paused thoughtfully. “I wonder if Germany can stand that much freedom.” It was one of the better questions Saul Goldman had heard lately. He wished he didn’t have to worry about the answer, too.

. .

Over on the far side of the barbed wire, the Germans were going out of their minds. To Alistair Walsh, that meant they were going further out of their minds than they already were. When soldiers wearing the same uniform but different armbands started shooting at one another, something was rotten in the state of Deutschland.

Only one thing could make all the Fritzes shoot in the same direction these days. When the English or French tried to push a little deeper into Belgium, the Germans turned from distracted lunatics in the middle of a civil war back into, well, Germans.

That was the last thing any of their foes wanted. Distracted lunatics were exciting, even entertaining, to watch. Germans were dangerous. All the Reich’s neighbors had two wars’ worth of experience-France had three-about just how dangerous Germans were.

So Walsh and his men sat tight. They didn’t shoot at the Fritzes. The Fritzes mostly didn’t shoot at them even if they showed themselves, as long as they didn’t look as if they were about to attack. It was a funny kind of war. Any kind of war that turned ordinary soldiers into would-be striped-pants diplomats struck Walsh as pretty funny.

But that was what this war was doing. Jack Scholes came up to Walsh and demanded, “ ’Ere, Staff, wot kind of peace d’you reckon the Germans’ll figure is cricket?”

“Haven’t the foggiest,” Walsh answered; he wasn’t ashamed to admit he had no notion of what would happen next. “Hell’s bells, Jack, we don’t even know whether the generals can beat the Nazis, or whether somebody like Himmler-no, they say Himmler’s dead: somebody like Heydrich, then-turns into the next Führer. If that happens, the fighting’ll be on again for real soon enough.”

“Say the generals win.” Yes, Scholes was like a terrier; he didn’t want to let go of what he grabbed on to.

“It would have to be something close to the status quo ante bellum, I expect,” Walsh said, sucked into the argument in spite of himself.

“To the wot?” Latin was Greek to Scholes. “Blimey, you throw the fancy talk around like a toff, you do.”

“Bugger off! There. Is that plain enough?” Walsh said. The private grinned at him, showing off snaggled yellow teeth. The only reason Walsh knew the sonorous Latin phrase was that he’d heard it a lot the last time around. He explained: “To the way things were before the war.”

“Oh.” Jack Scholes pondered, then nodded. “Makes sense. Can’t let ’em fink they turned a profit on the deal, can we?”

“I hope not,” Walsh said. He lit a Navy Cut, offered one to Scholes, and let out a long, smoke-filled sigh. “Of course, if we don’t flatten them right and proper now, chances are we’ll have another dustup with them fifteen or twenty years down the road.”

Scholes sent him a sly grin. “Chances are, eh? Chances are it won’t be your worry then, too.”

“I hope not. I’ve already got shot in two wars-three would be too bloody many. But you’ll be a staff sergeant yourself by then if you stay in.”

“Roight. And then you wake up.” The kid reacted with automatic mockery. A moment later, though, his gray-blue eyes narrowed. “D’yer really fink Oi could?”

“Why not? The other soldiers respect you, and you’ve picked up a lot since we first bumped into each other,” Walsh said.

“Since you first got stuck wiv me, you mean,” Scholes said, not without pride.

“You said it-I didn’t.”

“A staff sergeant? Me? Cor! Wouldn’t me mum bust ’er buttons?” But Scholes’ eyes narrowed again, this time in a different way. “ ’Course, I’ve got to live through this little go-round first, eh?”

“It would help,” Walsh admitted dryly. The younger man grunted laughter. Walsh went on, “Your chances now are a hell of a lot better than they were a few days ago, at least if the German Salvation Committee wins its scrap with the Nazis.”

“You’ve got that right, I expect,” Scholes said. “But if peace goes an’ breaks out, ’oo says the Army’ll want to keep a scrawny West ’Am supporter loike me?”

He had a point. East End Cockneys weren’t always the first choice of the powers that be for promotion or for anything else that didn’t involve the risk of sudden death. They weren’t calm and reliable and obedient, the way country boys were supposed to be. Like their counterparts from Mancunian and Liverpudlian slums, they had the nasty habit of doing as they pleased, not as they were told.

Still, Walsh said, “I would have gone back to digging coal if they hadn’t decided to keep me in khaki in 1919. There are ways to get them to do what you want-and I’ll be glad to put in a good word for you. We need blokes who can tell privates what to do … and who can look a subaltern in the eye and let him know he’s a goddamn fool.”

Jack Scholes laughed again. “Oi’d ’ate that, Oi would.”

“I daresay.” Walsh chuckled, too. “You can’t let them know you enjoy it, though. You can’t let them know you’re laughing at them. Mm, most of the time you can’t, anyhow. They need that every once in a while.”

“When you can’t get ’em to pull their ’eads out of their arse’oles any other way?” Scholes guessed shrewdly.

“Something like that, yes.” In a few years, Walsh wouldn’t have wanted to be the junior lieutenant who rubbed Scholes the wrong way. No subaltern would make that mistake more than once. The experience might be educational. It would definitely be traumatic.

A sentry called, “German coming this way with a white flag!”

Walsh got up onto the firing step to look east into Belgium. “We’ve seen more flags of truce since the Fritzes did for Adolf than in the whole war up till then,” he remarked.

This German looked like … a German: boots, Feldgrau, Schmeisser, coal-scuttle helmet. He had an Iron Cross First Class on his left breast pocket. After a moment, Walsh noticed he wore his shoulder straps upside down. Noncoms and officers often did that so snipers wouldn’t spot their rank badges and single them out.

“Far enough!” Walsh yelled to him. “Put down the weapon! Hände hoch!”

The German obediently set the machine pistol on the ground and raised his hands. “I carried it to protect myself from my countrymen, not to attack you,” he said in excellent English.

That Walsh believed him was a sign of how much and how fast things had changed. “Come on, then,” he called.

Still holding up his white flag, the Fritz did. His unloving countrymen started shooting at him before he made it to the English trenches. He hit the dirt with professional speed and crawled the last few yards before slithering down into what Bruce Bairnsfather had so memorably tagged “a better ’ole” during the last war.

“I hope they won’t start throwing mortar bombs at us because you got away,” Walsh said.

“I likewise,” the German agreed. “I am Ludwig Bauer. I am a major.” He rattled off his pay number, adding, “And now I am well out the war.”

“Which side were you on?” Walsh asked. When the officer hesitated, Walsh said, “I won’t throw you back either way-I promise. But I do want to know.”

“May I say I am on Germany’s side and leave it there?” Bauer returned. “Other Germans may want to shoot me, but I do not want to shoot them. I would rather a prisoner of war become than hurt my own Volk.”

As a military coup ousted England’s pro-appeasement government, some nasty Scotland Yard men hadn’t worried at all about hurting Walsh, who opposed them. “Well, I can understand that,” he said, and meant it. He turned to Jack Scholes. “Take the major back to regimental HQ. They’ll carry on from there. We don’t have to fight him any more-just feed him.”

“Roight.” Scholes gestured with his rifle. “Come along, you.” Bauer came. He seemed as happy as a sheep in clover. And why not? Unless choking on the slop POWs ate killed him, he’d live to go home again.

The clock over the stove said it was coming up on seven o’clock: time for the morning news. Peggy Druce turned on the radio. She didn’t want to miss anything. The Inquirer sat on the kitchen table, but the news it held was several hours old by now. Things had been changing so fast, she wanted to stay up to the minute.

Along with the paper, she had her first cup of coffee on the table. Her first cigarette of the day sat in an ashtray, sending a thin, twisting ribbon of smoke up toward the ceiling. She hadn’t worried about breakfast yet; she wouldn’t starve before she found out what was going on.

She suffered through a singing commercial for a brand of cigarettes she couldn’t stand and another one for an oleomargarine that promised it was just as good as “the costlier spread.” She snorted and tried without much luck to blow a smoke ring. The oleomargarine makers couldn’t call it butter because dairy farmers didn’t want the competition. A lot of places, it wasn’t even legal to add yellow coloring to oleomargarine.

But the dairy farmers weren’t the only ones trying to grease the people who bought things. Peggy’d tried oleomargarine, which had a much more generous ration allowance than “the costlier spread” did. She’d tried it once, that is. To her, it tasted more like machine oil than butter.

“This is Douglas Edwards with the news,” the familiar voice announced. “The German Salvation Committee continues to make progress in its fight against diehard Nazis. There are reports of panzer battles in the Ruhr and others outside of Berlin pitting the Waffen-SS against Wehrmacht units loyal to General Guderian and the Committee. SS casualties are said to be very heavy.”

Peggy stubbed out the cigarette. Some of that was in the Inquirer, but not all of it. She thought about lighting another one, but decided to wait till after breakfast. She sipped her coffee instead.

“German Salvation Committee members are discussing peace terms in London, Paris, and Moscow,” Edwards went on. “Certain broad outlines have become plain. Germany definitely will evacuate the Low Countries and Denmark and Norway. Her forces will also leave the western areas of the Soviet Union that they still occupy. The Salvation Committee agrees to all of this without complaint.”

The Salvation Committee had agreed to all of that a couple of days earlier. The Inquirer had already reported about it. Peggy waited to hear some of the new news she’d been hoping for, or at least to hear there was no new news.

“There seem to be a few sticking points in seeking a general European peace. One involves Austria, another Czechoslovakia, a third the district around the Polish city of Wilno, which is also claimed by the USSR, and the last the fate of the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

“German diplomats point out that the other great powers had accepted the Anschluss joining Austria to Germany in 1938, and that England and France were on the point of conceding the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland to Germany when the assassination of Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein by a Czech nationalist touched off the Second World War. They also point out that the Slovaks are happier in an independent Slovakia than they were as, ah, country cousins in the former Czechoslovakia.

“These same German diplomats object to Stalin’s claims against Wilno and the Baltic states. They plainly don’t want to let down their Polish allies, who have also suffered severe losses against Russia. Stalin’s attitude seems to be that, if Germany can come out of the war with more than she began it with, the USSR should be able to do so, as well.

“Talks, then, continue. It seems as though neither England nor France is sure of how hard a line to take. It also seems that President Roosevelt has not yet made up his mind how hard to push them-or how hard he can push them, since America so recently entered the European war. More after these important messages.”

These messages were important only if you had dentures or were constipated. Peggy turned on the burner under the coffee pot to heat it up. Maybe Douglas Edwards would have more to say about the European situation after the commercials. She wanted to find out whether the Salvation Committee intended to start treating Jews like human beings again. If it did, and if it was willing to say it did, she figured she would have to take it seriously.

But the next story was about an American bomber raid against Jap-held Wake Island. There was also a story about a naval battle somewhere in the South Pacific where both sides claimed to have mauled their foes’ aircraft carriers. And there was a story about how all the American soldiers and sailors in Australia were popularizing baseball there.

As soon as that one started, Peggy realized she wouldn’t hear any more serious war news. She poured herself the second cup of coffee and fixed her breakfast eggs and toast. After she did the dishes, she went after the Inquirer’s crossword puzzle. The guy who put the clues together thought he was cute. As far as she was concerned, he gave himself too much credit. Gigantic trouble (2 words), for instance, turned out to be MELOTT. You wanted to throw something harder and heavier and pointier than a horsehide at somebody who did something like that.

She’d been in Czechoslovakia when the Germans invaded it, going on six years ago now. She didn’t think they deserved to keep any of it. They’d started doing horrible things to the Jews there as soon as they invaded, and as far as she knew they hadn’t stopped since. They didn’t exactly give the Czechs a great big kiss, either. As for Slovakia, the thugs running it were a pack of cheap imitation Nazis. One of them was a priest, but he still acted like a cheap imitation Nazi.

Of course, what she thought the Germans deserved had nothing to do with the price of beer. Great-power diplomacy was what it was, not what you wished it would be. As Douglas Edwards had pointed out, in 1938 England and France let Germany swallow Austria and were ready to sell Czechoslovakia down the river. Hitler attacked it without even giving them the chance. The world hadn’t seen peace since.

When Chamberlain and Daladier went to Munich to try to talk Hitler into letting them hand him the Sudetenland on a plate instead of running into the kitchen and grabbing it himself, Czechoslovakia’s diplomats hadn’t even been allowed in the room. They’d had to sit and wait while foreigners decided their country’s future.

Would anybody pay attention now to what the Czechs wanted? Peggy tried to hope so. Try as she would, she had trouble bringing it off. England and France hadn’t been eager to fight over Czechoslovakia to begin with. They’d done it, but with no great enthusiasm. They still had none for the war. Hitler had shown himself to be full of deadly dangerous ambition. If General Guderian and his friends didn’t want to lie down with the lamb and get up with lamb chops, the European democracies would deal with them.

By the same token, no one outside the area was likely to get excited about which country the people in and around Wilno wanted to belong to. No, the question was, who got to have it? Right this minute, Stalin looked like the odds-on favorite. For that matter, who outside the Baltic region would notice or care if the USSR quietly gobbled up Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? They’d belonged to the Russian Empire for a long time.

The Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians liked independence? They didn’t want to belong to the Soviet Union? What had Chamberlain called the 1938 Czechoslovakian crisis? A quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. Yes, that was it. And that was how almost the whole world would feel about this quarrel, too.

After Peggy finished the crossword puzzle, she fixed herself a stiff bourbon on the rocks. She didn’t usually start off so early-that was for lushes. But she’d gone and thought herself sad. As long as you didn’t drink yourself blind, bourbon made a pretty good medicine for that.

Anastas Mouradian was trying to explain the current status of the war to Isa Mogamedov. “Suppose you have a cat in a box, a box where you can’t see or hear anything inside,” he told his copilot.

“I have a cat, da.” Mogamedov nodded agreeably. “Is it a good Soviet kitty or a nasty, hissing, biting Fascist fleabag?”

“Bear with me. Suppose you want to find out whether the cat in the box is alive or dead.”

“You open the box,” Mogamedov said.

“Suppose you want to find out without opening the box, though.”

“Can you smell inside, to find out whether the cat is shitting or rotting?”

“Not that, either.”

“Well, how do you tell, then?” the Azeri asked with the air of a man humoring a lunatic.

“I’ve thought a lot about it, and the way it looks to me is, you can’t tell till you open the box and you see whether a live cat jumps out or something’s in there stinking that you’ve got to chuck on the rubbish pile. Till then, you just don’t know. As far as you’re concerned, the cat is alive and dead at the same time … until you open the box and see,” Stas said.

Mogamedov muttered a few words in Azeri. Stas didn’t understand them, but the tone left something to be desired. Then Mogamedov switched back to Russian: “And this has what, exactly, to do with the war?”

“Well, mostly that we don’t know what will happen-we have no way of knowing-till either it happens or it doesn’t,” Mouradian answered. “Maybe we’ll go back to bombing the Fritzes and they’ll go back to trying to shoot us down. Or maybe it will be peace, and we start figuring out what to do with our lives from then on. In the meantime, though, the war is alive, but it’s dead, too.”

What he said made sense to him-a peculiar kind of sense, but sense even so. Whether it made even a peculiar kind of sense to anyone else … he was about to find out. If Mogamedov laughed in his face, he thought he really would have to look for another crewmate, no matter if putting in the request meant a black mark on his record.

The Azeri looked as if he were about to laugh. Then he stopped looking that way. Quite visibly, he thought it over. After a minute or so, he said, “Well, you’re not as crazy as I thought you were when you first came out with it. Or I don’t think you are, anyhow.”

“Thanks,” Stas said. “I know it’s loopy, but it’s interesting to play with in your head, too, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Mogamedov nodded “Not a dead war, not a live war … That’s what we’ve got, all right.”

He must have liked the conceit well enough to pass it along to other flyers and groundcrew men. Pretty soon, people all over the air base were talking about “Mouradian’s cat.” Isa hadn’t stolen the credit for it. Or he might have decided he wanted to stick Stas with the blame.

That was another one of those cases where you couldn’t know the answer till after you asked the question. You might not know even then. When you opened the imaginary box, a live cat either would or wouldn’t hop out. A dead cat couldn’t lie about being alive. But Isa Mogamedov could lie.

Stas didn’t give him the chance. He didn’t ask.

Some of the Red Air Force men teased him about “Mouradian’s cat.” A few seemed interested in the paradox. He was more proud than otherwise to have his name attached to something people were talking about.

He was for a little while, anyhow. Fighting men being what they were, they didn’t talk about “Mouradian’s cat” for long. Pretty soon, they started going on about “Mouradian’s pussy.” That might have been funny once-to him. To a lot of the guys, it got funnier every time they said it.

“Hey, Stas,” another lieutenant called at supper, “how’s your pussy?”

“Well, Volodya, why don’t you step outside the tent here, and I’ll show it to you,” Mouradian answered calmly.

Everyone whooped as they strode out together. Half a minute later, Stas came back in. He sat down and returned to the kasha and mutton in his mess tin. Some of the knuckles on his left hand were skinned. His right ankle was sore from kicking Vladimir Ostrogorsky in the belly so hard, but that didn’t show.

When the Russian didn’t come back in right away, a couple of men went out to see what had happened to him. They came back staring at Stas. “Bozehmoi, Mouradian,” one of them said. “Volodya won’t ask about your pussy again any time soon.”

“That was the idea,” Stas answered, and returned to his supper without another word.

He did wonder how many friends Lieutenant Ostrogorsky had, and whether they’d try to pay him back. He dared hope they wouldn’t. Ostrogorsky had been asking for it. Anybody could see that. Well, Stas hoped anybody could see it.

At last, Ostrogorsky did walk in. By the shaky way he moved, he might have downed a liter of vodka. His eyes didn’t quite track, either. He had a bruise on the side of his jaw; a trickle of blood ran down his chin from one corner of his mouth.

“You don’t fight fair,” he told Mouradian.

“Too bad,” Stas said. “You want an engraved invitation, go join a boxing club. And tell your jokes somewhere else.”

“If I tell a really funny one, you’ll probably murder me.” Ostrogorsky rubbed his midsection. Stas’ kick had caught him right in the solar plexus. After that, the Russian couldn’t have fought back no matter how badly he wanted to.

Stas only shrugged. He wanted to say he was done with it if Ostrogorsky was. He didn’t, though. He worried the other man would take it as a sign of weakness. Someone from the Caucasus surely would have. Russians didn’t ritualize revenge the way southern men did, but Mouradian wanted to keep the edge he’d won for himself.

After supper, Isa Mogamedov said, “I’m sorry. I should have known they would turn it into something filthy. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“Nichevo,” Stas replied. Yes, that was a useful Russian word.

“I didn’t know you were such a tough bitch, either.” Mogamedov brought out blyad with the self-consciousness anyone who hadn’t grown up speaking Russian showed when he took a mild stab at mat.

“Partly luck,” Stas said, adding another shrug. “Partly I surprised him. He must have thought I was going to spend a while cussing before I started fighting. But why waste time?”

“Remind me not to get you that mad at me,” the Azeri said,

The squadron commander called Stas in on the carpet the next morning. Lieutenant Colonel Leonid Krasnikov was a squat, blond, wide-faced man, about as Russian-looking as any Russian could get. Silver-framed glasses only made his gray eyes colder. But all he said was, “Did you have to hit him that fucking hard, Mouradian?”

“I’m sorry, Comrade Colonel,” Stas answered, which was true … up to a point. “I hoped that, if I did a proper job of it once, I wouldn’t have to do it over and over.”

“Is that what you hoped?” Krasnikov’s stare got no friendlier. He sighed. “Well, except for a broken tooth you didn’t do any permanent damage. And you were provoked. So get out of here.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Stas saluted and left. The squadron commander had some humanity lurking in him after all. Who would have guessed that? Maybe there wouldn’t be any more fighting in the air or on the ground. Maybe the cat was alive. Maybe.