The Big Switch

Chapter 16

The next time Chaim Weinberg ran into La Martellita, it wasn’t because he was looking for her. It was because he got a pass to go back into Madrid and happened to walk into the bar where she was already drinking. Madrid had a lot-a devil of a lot-of bars. It was just dumb luck. After the way she’d sliced him to pieces outside Party headquarters, he was damned if he thought it was good luck.

His wounds were still fresh enough to hurt. He didn’t go over to her or try to pick her up. He just ordered a beer and some olives and crackers and sat down at a little table where he could look at her without making a pest of himself doing it.

She was already drunk, and getting drunker. No doubt hoping to take advantage of her, the guy beside her set a confident Spanish hand on her knee. Chaim wanted to do things like that so confidently. He wanted to flap his arms and fly, too.

Confident or not, the Spaniard misread the signs. La Martellita picked up his beer mug, threw the beer in his face, and broke the mug over his head. “?Madre de Dios!” he shrieked, beer and blood running down his cheeks and dripping from his nose and chin. “What did you do that for?”

“To teach you to keep your hands to yourself, you shitheaded motherfucking no-balls faggot,” she answered, and went on from there. Spanish was a good language to swear in, and Chaim realized he was listening to a modern master.

Like the beer and his own blood, it all rolled off the Spaniard. With immense dignity, he accepted a towel from the bartender and patted himself dry. When he saw how much blood splotched the towel, he mournfully shook his head. He got to his feet, which impressed Chaim. After a clop like that, the guy might have had a fractured skull.

He actually bowed to La Martellita. “You don’t need to worry about that any more, not with me,” he said. “You may be a whore, but you are a frigid whore.” He turned and walked out. He was taking a chance-she might have knifed him in the back or chased after him and beaten him to peanut butter. All she did, though, was give him more details on where to go and how to get there.

Then, to Chaim’s alarm, she picked up her glass of whiskey or brandy or whatever the hell it was and carried it over to his table. Unlike the hard-headed Spaniard, she wobbled when she walked. She plopped herself down across from him with a warning glare. “Don’t you start anything,” she snapped, breathing high-proof fumes in his face.

“What? You think I’m loco?” he said. “I like my head. It’s the only one I’ve got. I don’t want you to break it for me.”

“You’d better not,” she said fiercely. Then she took another big swig from her glass. How many times had she already emptied it? Quite a few, if Chaim was any judge. She slammed the glass down, slopping a little booze over the edge. And then she started to cry.

Weeping belligerent shikker women, care and management of was a manual Chaim hadn’t read. Hell, he didn’t even know where they issued it. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You still mad at that guy?”

She stared at him as if she thought he was even more cretinous than usual. “Claudio? Oh, no. He’s just an asshole,” she answered. “But the revolution in Spain is ru-ru-ruined.” She had to try three times before she could get the word out. It made her cry harder than ever. Eyeliner and mascara dribbled down her face. She dabbed at her eyes with a dirty handkerchief.

Chaim wanted to cuddle her and comfort her and tell her everything would be fine. He would sooner have tried it with a rattlesnake. All he said was “We’re doing fine. The Nationalists haven’t beaten us yet, and they won’t.”

The look she gave him then made him think he’d have to study to be a cretin. “Where will our munitions come from?” she said. “England and France have jumped into bed with the Nazis. Do you think they’ll keep sending arms to the progressive elements here? It will be even worse than it was before the big war started.”

If she was right, the Spanish Republic was, to use a technical term, screwed. But Chaim only shrugged. “They weren’t sending us much before,” he said. “They were using the stuff themselves.”

“They kept the Sanjurjo junta from getting any, though,” La Martellita said. She hiccuped, whether drunkenly or because she’d been crying Chaim couldn’t tell. “Now they won’t.”

He shrugged again. “If Germany is fighting the Russians right next door, she won’t have much to spare for the half-assed Fascists way the hell over here.”

This time, she eyed him like a floating spar in the middle of the ocean. “Do you really think so?” she asked. He wondered if he could get plastered on her breath. What a way to go, he thought dizzily.

“Sure,” he said with yet another up-and-down of the shoulders. “You wait. We’ll whip the bastards yet.”

Instead of answering, she upended the glass and waved peremptorily for a refill. Chaim recognized the brandy bottle the barman brought to the table. That shit was a distilled artillery barrage. She’d regret it come morning. Jesus, would she ever! But she poured down some more. With muzzy suspicion, she said, “Maybe you’re trying to soften me up so you can go to bed with me.”

“No,” he said, and the regret in his voice was plangent. “I don’t want you to kill me, and I don’t want Sanjurjo’s pendejos to kill me, either.”

“That’s what you say.” But even La Martellita couldn’t make herself sound too angry at him.

He nodded. “Yes. That is what I say. What can you do after you get killed?”

She considered his foolishness with drunken gravity. Then she thrust out an accusing forefinger at him. “You were very silly there, outside the Party offices. You looked like a boy who couldn’t get the candy he wanted.”

“Asi es la vida.” Chaim used that one a lot. When you spoke a language badly, cliches came in handy. And So it goes was better than bursting into tears the way she had. He thought it was, anyhow.

La Martellita wagged the finger his way. “You still want the candy.”

“Well, so what?” He hadn’t drunk a lot of beer, but he could feel his temper fraying. She’d drive a saint to armed robbery. Not without bitterness, he added, “Who wouldn’t? You’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re-” He stopped. Dammit, he didn’t know how to say sexy in Spanish. What the hell? He said it in English instead.

She understood it. He saw that right away. He wondered if he’d get a faceful of brandy with a glass chaser, the way she’d baptized luckless Claudio with beer. “But you don’t try groping me,” she said, and drank some of the vicious stuff instead of flinging it.

Yet another shrug. “Not American style. Not my style. Just coming to see you took all the nerve I had.”

La Martellita got to her feet. Chaim was amazed she could. “I am going home,” she announced, as if challenging him to doubt her.

He scrambled out of his chair. “I’ll help you get there.”

“I don’t need nobody’s-anybody’s help!” She swayed, caught herself, and giggled. “Well, maybe I do.”

Out into the blacked-out night. There was a moon, which helped… some. He hoped like hell she remembered where she lived. He also hoped it wasn’t far. She lurched like a schooner in contrary winds. Once all that brandy kicked in, she was going to keel over.

He didn’t grope her, except incidentally, but by the time they got to her block of flats he was pretty much holding her upright. He didn’t quite carry her up the stairs to the third floor, but close. Then along the hallway. “This one,” she said. He hoped she was right. Otherwise, whoever lived in there would think he was getting burgled.

The key worked. They went in. Nobody screamed or opened fire. La Martellita swiped at a wall switch. By some miracle, she hit it. A blackout curtain kept the light inside. The flat was tiny: a bed, a chair, a chest, a small bookshelf with a radio on top, a sink, a hot plate. The toilet and bathtub had to be down the hall. Chaim had lived in places like that.

She made it to the bed, fell onto it, and smiled at him, or maybe at the low ceiling. She was gassed. Lord, was she ever! A gentleman would have left, and hated himself ever afterwards. As Chaim had told more than one Spaniard, he was no gentleman. And, no matter how drunk she was, she wouldn’t have brought him here if she didn’t think he would try something… would she?

Only one way to find out. He turned off the light and advanced on the bed. She might hate him in the morning. In the morning, though, she’d hate the whole goddamn world. Whatever happened in the morning, he’d worry about it then.

Along with the rest of the forces of the Czech government-in-exile, Vaclav Jezek stood at attention a couple of kilometers behind the now-quiet line. A French major was going to address them. It wasn’t as if the son of a bitch spoke Czech. That would have been too much to hope for. Sergeant Benjamin Halevy stood at his elbow to translate.

The major had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. He coughed into his hand a couple of times before beginning. “Gentlemen, the Republic of France owes you a debt of gratitude. When times were hard, you came to our aid.”

“And now you’re going to sell us down the river, you piece of shit!” a man not far behind Vaclav shouted.

Sergeant Halevy translated that for the major, though probably not all of it. The Frenchman coughed again. “Well, you see, gentlemen, the situation has changed recently,” he said.

More jeers from the Czechs: “You’re fucking Hitler now-he’s not fucking you!” “The Russians really helped us! That’s more than you ever did!” And a rising chorus that drowned out all the individual insults: “Shame!” Vaclav joined in, baying the word at the top of his lungs.

“We do not abandon men who have helped us,” the French major said stiffly. “Under no circumstances will we allow the Germans to take control of you. We understand that your authorities are still at war with them, even if that, ah, no longer obtains for us.”

Halevy was a good translator. He even put in the officer’s hems and haws, and imitated his tone very well. But so what? The bottom line was, even if the Nazis didn’t get hold of this battered detachment, France would screw the Czechs for them.

The major proceeded to explain just how France would screw them: “If you wish to remain in France as civilians, you may do that. If you wish to be interned in Switzerland, which remains neutral, you may also do that.”

He didn’t say France would do anything for the Czechs. Stay here? Vaclav didn’t know the language, and didn’t much want to learn. More likely than not, he’d starve before he could. Switzerland? He’d already been interned in Poland. The Swiss would probably be friendlier about it-like most Czechs, he didn’t think Poles were nice people-but even so…

“Or there is another possibility,” the French major went on. “This would have to be done unofficially, you understand. Despite altered circumstances, we still maintain diplomatic relations with the Spanish Republic. You would need to enter on tourist visas issued by your government-in-exile, and we would have no formal knowledge of your doing so. But if, once you were there, you continued to uphold your cause, we would be able to say with a clear conscience that it was none of our doing.”

Now that they were licking the Germans’ boots, they didn’t want to piss off the people wearing said boots. That was what it came down to. Even a corporal like Vaclav Jezek didn’t need field glasses to see it.

“Suppose we go after you traitors instead?” another Czech yelled.

Vaclav wondered if Sergeant Halevy would translate that. He evidently did, because the major performed a classic Gallic shrug. He spoke briefly. Halevy put it into Czech, also briefly: “That would be unfortunate-for you.”

Vaclav found himself nodding. He didn’t want to, but he also didn’t see that he had much choice. The Czechs had numbered about a regiment’s worth of men when they went into action in France. They’d taken more casualties than replacements since. They had no tanks, or even armored cars. They could annoy the French if they rebelled, but that was about all.

Spain. He spat in disgust. It would be another losing war. The Republic was fucked the same way the Czechs were. Politics had got ahead of it, and now it was going under in the backwash.

What were the Nazis doing to Prague? What were they doing to the rest of Bohemia and Moravia? Next to no news came out of Czechoslovakia these days, but the answer had to be nothing good.

“God will punish you for selling out freedom!” another Czech shouted, shaking his fist at the major.

It had nothing to do with God. Vaclav understood that very well. France had decided that getting out of the war with Germany would work to her advantage. England had reached the same conclusion. And so they’d gone ahead and done it. The Czechs were just a minor problem to be cleaned up. By their standards, the French were being generous. They could have put their now-useless allies behind barbed wire. Or they could have handed them to their new friends, the Nazis. That would have been sweet, wouldn’t it?

Calmly, the French major answered, “I am prepared to take my chances. Any man who claims he knows what God will do only proves he has no idea what he is talking about.”

Sergeant Halevy went back and forth with the major in French. The officer shrugged once more, but nodded. Halevy turned back to the gloomy French soldiers standing before him. “For whatever it’s worth to you bastards, I’m coming with you. The French Army has let me resign, and the Czech government-in-exile has let me enlist. It needs people-even Jews-and the French authorities can see I won’t make a good little cog in the machine now that Hitler’s at the controls.”

What would the major have said had he understood Halevy’s claim that Hitler was running the French war machine? Something interesting and memorable, without a doubt. But Czech was only noise to him. Being a small nation, Czechs realized they needed to learn other people’s languages. Being a large and proud one, the French expected other people to learn theirs.

Vaclav didn’t know about the other Czechs, but he was glad to have Halevy along. He didn’t know that the Jew spoke Spanish, but he also didn’t know Halevy didn’t. He did know he wouldn’t have been surprised. And he knew Halevy made a damn good soldier. He wouldn’t have figured that when they first met. Everybody knew Jews weren’t fighters. Here as so often, what everybody knew proved nothing but bullshit.

The officer brayed out some more French. Again, Halevy did the honors: “He says we’re supposed to march to the nearest train station. They’ll take us over the Pyrenees, so they don’t have to think about us any more. That isn’t what he says-it’s me. But it’s what he means.”

March Vaclav did. He hadn’t done a route march in quite a while. Picking them up and laying them down was no more fun than it had been the last time. If anything, it was worse, because his antitank rifle weighed at least twice as much as an ordinary piece.

He wondered what the Spanish Republicans would make of a sniper with an elephant gun. From what he’d heard, neither side down there had much in the way of armor. Well, there’d be plenty of-what did they call the assholes on the other side? Nationalists, that was it-plenty of Nationalists who needed killing.

There’d probably be plenty of Republicans who needed killing, too. He hoped not too many of them tried giving him orders. The enemy… You could deal with the enemy. You knew what he was, and you knew where he was. But you were stuck with your so-called friends.

Benjamin Halevy fell in beside him. “I wish this turned out better,” the Jew said.

“Fuck it. What can you do?” Vaclav said. “Spain’ll be another balls-up, won’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Halevy answered. “But whenever the brass are willing to send you somewhere, you’ve got to guess they aren’t doing you a favor.”

“If they want to do me a favor, they can all drop dead.”

“There you go.” They marched on, away from one stalemated war that had suddenly flipped upside down and towards another.

As far as Theo Hossbach could see, Byelorussia looked a hell of a lot like Poland. Maybe it was a little shabbier, or maybe that was his imagination. He understood little bits and pieces of Polish, as a lot of Germans from Breslau did. Byelorussian sounded different, but not all that different. And a lot of villages had Jews in them. They could manage with German, and he could do the same with Yiddish.

The biggest change was in the signs. Polish and German used the same alphabet. Sometimes he could guess written words he didn’t know. But the Soviet Union’s Cyrillic script was almost as incomprehensible as Chinese would have been.

Adalbert Stoss said very much the same thing. When he did, Hermann Witt gave him a wry grin and answered, “We didn’t come here to read, Adi.”

“Ah, stuff it,” Adi said. They both laughed.

So did Theo. If Heinz Naumann had said something like that to Stoss, the driver probably would have come back with the same response. But Heinz wouldn’t have been grinning, and Adi would have meant what he said. That the other panzer commander and Stoss hadn’t got along was an understatement. Naumann was dead now, though, and the feud buried with him in a badly marked grave back in Poland.

Witt attacked the engine with screwdriver and wrench. After liberating the carburetor, he held it up in triumph… of sorts. He delivered his verdict like a judge pronouncing sentence: “This thing sucks, you know?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” Adi said. “We clean out the valves, it’ll do all right for a while-till it decides not to, anyway.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Witt agreed. “I wonder if the carb on the Panzer III’s any better.”

“I’d sure like to find out,” Stoss said.

Theo nodded. No matter what the carburetor was like, everything that counted was better on a Panzer III. Thicker armor, a cannon that could fire both high-explosive and armor-piercing rounds, a machine gun in the turret and another one in the hull… What was there not to like?

He could think of two things. The turret cannon and machine gun took a loader and gunner, which meant there would be a couple of new people to get used to-never his favorite pastime. And, more to the point, the Reich still didn’t have enough Panzer IIIs to go around, so he was worrying about getting used to a pair of imaginary soldiers.

Back when Naumann commanded the Panzer II, the carb also misbehaved. He and Adi had quarreled about it. Witt didn’t seem to want to quarrel with anybody except the Ivans. Theo approved of that.

The next morning, the promotion fairy sprinkled magic dust on the panzer’s crew. Adi became a Gefreiter, and Theo himself an Obergefreiter. Witt slapped him on the back and said, “They’ll pull you out and turn you into a real noncom pretty soon.”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Theo answered. The Wehrmacht had one more grade below Unteroffizier or corporal. After that, you had to go to training classes to get rid of the emblem on your sleeve and acquire an Unteroffizier’s shoulder-strap pip. Theo had had enough of training classes in basic to last him the rest of his life and twenty minutes longer.

Witt laughed. “Might do you good. It’d make you come out of your shell a little bit, maybe.”

“Maybe.” Theo didn’t believe it for a minute. He could no more come out of his shell than a turtle could escape from its. It was part of him. If anything, he wished he came equipped with a Panzer III’s armor, not a Panzer II’s.

Heinz Naumann would have gone on giving him grief about it. Witt didn’t. All he said was “You keep living through fights, they’ll make you an Unteroffizier whether you like it or not.”

“Oh, boy,” Theo said. The panzer commander laughed again. Had Theo been the kind to come out with what he was thinking, he might have added that he’d never run into a better reason to get killed. He hated the idea of giving other people orders. He didn’t like getting told what to do himself, either. He was, perhaps, not ideally suited to the Wehrmacht.

That, of course, bothered the Wehrmacht not a bit. Round peg? Square hole? Drive the damn thing in anyway. Hit it hard enough and it’ll stay in place. Then we can hang some more stuff from it and get on with the war.

Adi Stoss was thinking of other things. “You know what?” he said. “Winter in Russia’s liable to make winter in Poland look like a Riviera holiday.”

“Try not to sound so cheerful about it, all right?” Witt said. “Besides, we’ll have the Poles and the French and the Tommies shivering right beside us. Oh-and the Ivans, too, of course.”

“Aber naturlich,” Adi agreed with more sardonic good cheer. “But the Ivans do this every year. They’re used to it, poor devils. The rest of us aren’t, except maybe the Poles.”

“You’re jam-packed with happy thoughts today, aren’t you?” Witt said. “Why don’t you gather up some firewood?”

“I thought Gefreiters didn’t have to do shit like that,” Stoss said. “Isn’t the whole point of getting promoted not needing to do shit like that any more?”

“Like I told Theo, getting promoted means you didn’t get blown up,” the panzer commander answered. “If you figure out how to pack a servant into the panzer, he can gather firewood for us. Till then, somebody’s got to do it, and right now that’s you.”

“Come the revolution, you won’t be able to abuse the proletariat like this.” Adi went off to collect sticks and boards.

Witt looked after him, shaking his head. “He sails close to the wind, doesn’t he?” he murmured, perhaps more to himself than to Theo. “If somebody who takes the political lectures seriously heard him, he’d go on the rocks faster than a guy with the shits runs for the latrine.”

Theo shrugged to show he’d heard. He did his share of fatigues, even though he was now an exalted Obergefreiter. For that matter, so did the sergeant. Adi knew as much, too; he was just making trouble for the fun of it. A panzer wasn’t like an infantry platoon, with plenty of ordinary privates to do the dirty work for everyone else.

They rolled forward again the next morning-but not very far forward. The Russians had laid an ambush, with panzers hidden in a village and antipanzer cannon hiding among the fruit trees off to one side. The Germans pulled back after a couple of Panzer IIs brewed up and another lost a track.

Maybe the Ivans thought they’d halted their enemies. If they did, they soon learned better. Stukas plastered the orchard with high explosive. One of them, with cannon under the wings in place of bombs, dove on the village again and again. The columns of greasy black smoke rising into the sky spoke of hits.

Adi and Hermann Witt watched him swoop in the distance. They whooped and cheered and carried on. Theo watched the dials on the panzer’s radio set. He could see the machine pistol on its brackets near the set and, if he turned his head, the back of the chair in which the panzer commander sat. Since Witt wasn’t sitting now, Theo could also see his legs. It wasn’t an exciting view. Theo didn’t care. He wanted excitement the way he wanted a second head.

And, while the Stukas kept the Russians who’d set the trap hopping, more German panzers raced around their flank. The Ivans skedaddled; they were always nervous about their flanks. Theo’s panzer company, or the survivors thereof, rolled past the village where they’d been held up. They didn’t roll through it, a plan Theo liked. Nobody knew for sure whether all the Red Army men had abandoned the place. They might be waiting in there with Molotov cocktails and antipanzer rifles and whatever other unpleasantnesses they could come up with.

German and Polish infantry tramped along behind the panzers. Before too long, the ground pounders would come through here and clear out whatever Russians remained behind. In the meantime, the panzers would motor ahead and bite out another chunk of territory for the infantry to clear.

This was how things worked when blitzkrieg ran according to plan. When things went wrong, you outran your infantry support and the enemy concentrated against you where you couldn’t outflank him. That had happened in France. There was a lot more space to play with in the Soviet Union. Maybe it wouldn’t happen here. Theo hoped not. He wanted to win. More than anything else, though, he wanted to go home.

Anastas Mouradian would have liked more training on the Pe-2 than he got. No matter what he would have liked, he and his classmates went into action as soon as they figured out the controls and took off and landed a few times.

He did have a better plane than he’d flown before. The SB-2 had been a fine bomber in its day, but its day was done. In a couple of years, no doubt, something newer and snazzier would also replace the Pe-2. Till then, Mouradian was happy to fly one against the Soviet Union’s enemies.

Was Sergei Yaroslavsky still hauling his old SB-2 around the sky? For his sake, his former bomb-aimer hoped not. The Pe-2 was close to a 150 kilometers an hour faster. It could fly higher and carry more bombs. All that meant it had a better chance of coming back from its missions.

Three of his classmates at the airstrip outside of Moscow never got the chance to fly the new bomber against the Nazis. One of them botched a takeoff and crashed-or maybe an engine failed. Either way, he was dead. So were the two who flew their planes into the ground instead of landing them. Flying was an unforgiving business. If the Germans didn’t get you, a moment’s carelessness and you’d do yourself in.

His bomb-aimer and copilot was a Karelian named Ivan Kulkaanen. He was as blond as Anastas was dark, and spoke Russian with an odd accent. “Don’t worry-I think you sound funny, too,” he told Mouradian.

“When I talk Russian, I know I sound funny,” Stas answered. “But you should hear me in Armenian.”

Whereupon Kulkaanen gabbled out a couple of sentences in what Mouradian presumed to be his native tongue. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to him. “Finnish,” the blond man explained.

“If you say so.” Mouradian couldn’t contradict him.

Back in the bomb bay was a Russian sergeant called Fyodor Mechnikov. Like the other bombardiers Stas had known, he was brawny and foul-mouthed. “They took me off a farm,” he said, his grin displaying several stainless-steel teeth. “I’ve got the muscle. I don’t scare easy. For the shit I do, who needs brains?”

“Can you read? Can you write?” Stas asked.

Mechnikov shook his bullet head. “Not a fucking word, sir,” he answered, not without pride.

“I’ll teach you if you want.”

“Nah.” Mechnikov shook his head again. “I’ve gone this long without it, I wouldn’t know what to do if I could all of a sudden. And I remember real good. I start writing shit down, I bet I start forgetting like a son of a bitch.”

He might well have been right. Stas had dealt with more than a few illiterate enlisted men in his time. Russia was full of them. In Western Europe, they said, almost everybody could read and write. It wasn’t like that here. And illiterates did tend to have better memories than people who could read and write. They needed them.

The newsreaders on the radio tried their best to give the impression that everything at the front was fine. Their best might have convinced civilians who hadn’t seen German soldiers or had German bombs fall on them yet. But if everything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe, why was the Red Air Force rushing half-trained Pe-2 pilots to the front as fast as it could?

Stas didn’t think anything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe. He never had. Soviet propaganda was primarily aimed at Russians, and Russians, as seen through the jaundiced eye of a man from the Caucasus, lacked a certain subtlety. So did Soviet propaganda, at least to Mouradian. Stalin was a man from the Caucasus, too. Chances were he chuckled cynically at the stuff he had his propagandists put out. Which didn’t mean the stuff didn’t work.

And the new bombers worked, too-at least if you didn’t crash them trying to get them to work. The pilots flew their planes and aircrews west toward the border between Russian and Byelorussia. That they landed at airstrips still inside the Russia Federation gave the lie to the swill that poured out of radio speakers. No, things weren’t going nearly so well as the Soviet government wanted people to think.

English and French reinforcements for the Nazis hadn’t got here yet, either. What would happen when they joined the Germans and Poles? Nothing good, not if you were a Soviet citizen.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky seemed to know his business. He wasn’t a drunken blowhard like Colonel Borisov or a hopeless loser like the fellow who’d briefly given Mouradian orders in the Far East.

“The Nazis are still coming forward,” he told the newly assembled men of his newly assembled squadron. He didn’t bother mentioning the Poles. In his place, Stas wouldn’t have, either. Tomashevsky went on, “We can’t stop them all by ourselves, but we can hurt them. That will give the Red Army a better chance to do its job.”

Was he saying the Red Army wasn’t doing its job? Would some political officer rake him over the coals for telling the truth? Such things happened all the time. That was a shame, but they did.

“One more thing,” he added. “The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union isn’t to try and dogfight the 109s. The Pe-2 may have started out as a heavy fighter, but it’s a bomber now. It’s a good bomber, but it’s still a bomber, dammit. The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union is to finish your mission, come back, and fly your next one and the one after that. That’s what heroes do: what needs doing. Go take care of it.”

Thus encouraged, they hurried to their planes. Antiaircraft guns’ snouts stuck up around the airstrip. Stas hadn’t seen any bomb craters, though. The Germans hadn’t found this place, then. Not yet.

Groundcrew men bombed up the squadron’s Pe-2s. Fyodor Mechnikov was ready. “Let’s blow the living shit out of these Nazi cunts,” he said.

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Stas replied.

Up they went. After the more sedate SB-2, takeoff in the new machine was like a kick in the pants. “I could get used to this,” Ivan Kulkaanen remarked.

“Let’s hope so,” Stas answered. Kulkaanen gave him a sidelong look. Stas didn’t know about Karelians in general-he hadn’t met many-but his bomb-aimer had an ear for the little things… if they were little. If the aircrew didn’t get used to these takeoffs, they’d probably be too dead to care.

They droned west. Orders were to hit the Germans outside of Mogilev, on the Dnieper. When they got there, they discovered the enemy was already ten or fifteen kilometers over the river. They bombed the biggest concentration of Germans they could find. Antiaircraft fire came up at them from the ground, but it wasn’t too bad. Mouradian had flown through plenty worse. No Messerschmitts seemed to be in the neighborhood. Nobody could anger Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky by pretending the Pe-2 still was the fighter it had originally been intended to be.

Once the bomb bay was empty, they sped back to Russia-Mother Russia to Mechnikov, if not to Mouradian or Kulkaanen (although it was to Tomashevsky: by his name, he was a Russian). Stas taxied into a revetment and killed the engines. As soon as the props stopped spinning, groundcrew men spread camouflage netting over the plane. The Germans wouldn’t have an easy time finding this airstrip.

Unless, of course, they followed the Red Air Force planes and watched where they landed. Maybe that was what happened. Any which way, the antiaircraft guns around the airstrip suddenly all seemed to go off at once. Mouradian, Kulkaanen, and Mechnikov scrambled out of the Pe-2 and sprinted for the nearest slit trench.

One after another, Stukas dove on the field. The first one flattened what had been a kolkhoz supervisor’s office and was now Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky’s headquarters. Stas hoped Tomashevsky hadn’t got back in it yet. Two other dive-bombers planted 500-kilo bombs right in the middle of the runway. Nobody would fly in or out till those holes got filled. And a fourth German bomber blew up a Pe-2 in spite of the netting that covered it. The flak didn’t get any Stukas. As they roared off to the west, Mouradian only wished he were more surprised.