The Big Switch

Chapter 20

Alistair Walsh approached the personnel office with more trepidation than he’d felt crossing some minefields. All the same, he opened the door, took his place in the queue inside, and worked his way forward. Most of the men in front of him were ordinary privates with ordinary problems. He envied them.

In due course, he presented himself at a window behind which sat a noncom with almost as much mileage as he had himself. “Yes, Staff Sergeant?” the fellow said. “What can I do for you this morning?”

“I should like to make the arrangements necessary for leaving the Army.” Walsh shook his head. That wasn’t right, and he wouldn’t pretend it was. “No. I don’t like it. I’ve never liked anything less-except the notion of staying in and fighting on Hitler’s side.”

He waited for the personnel sergeant to call him an unpatriotic clot or some other similar endearment. The man did nothing of the kind. Nor did he seem surprised. How many other soldiers had come before him with the same request? More than a few, if Walsh was any judge.

“Are you sure of this?” the personnel sergeant asked. “The Army needs men like you-men who know what’s what.”

“Yes, I’m sure. I’m not happy, but I’m bloody sure,” Walsh answered. “And the Army may need me, but I don’t need the Army any more. If it’s going to do… this, it’s not what I took the King’s shilling for all these years ago.”

“You understand, of course, that only a small minority of military personnel feel as you do?”

“No. I don’t understand that at all.” Walsh shook his head. “Blokes I’ve talked with, most of ’em are disgusted to have anything to do with the Nazis except over open sights. Only difference is, they aren’t disgusted enough to want to leave. It’s not the same thing, you know.”

“Possibly not.” But the personnel sergeant wasn’t finished: “You also understand that, of the men who wish to resign, we permit only a small proportion to do so?”

“Urrh,” Walsh said-as unhappy a noise as he’d ever made this side of a wound. He’d been afraid of that. He stuck out his chin. “I’ll take my chances. I can’t stomach it any more, and that’s flat.”

“How about this, then?” said the man on the other side of the desk. “You could stay in, with a guarantee from the Ministry of War that you’d never have to serve alongside the German Army.”

“The Ministry of War… makes guarantees like that?” Walsh said slowly.

“Under some circumstances, yes. To some people, yes.” After a moment’s hesitation, the personnel sergeant expanded on that: “It makes the guarantee to men it judges valuable enough to the Army. By your rank and experience, you would be one of those men. And it makes that guarantee where it does not look for any sizable amount of publicity, if you take my meaning.”

“If I blab about it in the nearest pub, the guarantee flies out the window.” Yes, Walsh took his meaning, all right.

“Quite.” The personnel sergeant smiled. “So what do you say to that?”

Regretfully, Walsh answered, “I still want out. It’s not just that I don’t fancy fighting alongside Hitler’s goons. I don’t want Britain fighting alongside them. It goes dead against everything the country stands for.”

“The Government thinks otherwise,” the other veteran said, his smile disappearing. Walsh could hear the capital letter.

“Bugger the Government.” He gave it right back. “Churchill was in the sodding government. How did he come to die?”

“It was an accident, a tragic accident,” the personnel sergeant said primly.

“Right, mate. Sure it was. And then you wake up,” Walsh retorted. “You’d better wake up, any road, on account of if you believe that you’ll believe anything.”

“Oh. You’re one of those,” the personnel sergeant said, as if much was now explained. “Let me check something.” He consulted a typed list. Walsh recognized his own name even upside down. The other man made a tickmark alongside it in pencil. His voice went as cold as Norwegian winter: “You still wish to leave his Majesty’s service, then?”

What Walsh wished right at that moment was for a chance to punch the personnel sergeant in the nose. It would have to come some other time, though. Too bad. “Yes. I still want that,” he said heavily.

“Well, we can accommodate you, then, and in jig time, too.” The personnel sergeant reached into a drawer, pulled out forms, and shoved them across the counter at him. “Complete these, and we’ll carry on from there.”

“Right.” Walsh bent to the task. When he came to the line that read Reason for seeking discharge, he couldn’t help snorting. The personnel sergeant raised a questioning eyebrow. Walsh pointed to the line and said, “Looks like they want to know why I want the clap.”

“Damned if it doesn’t. Never noticed that before.” The personnel sergeant would laugh at such foolishness. Walsh had trouble imagining a soldier who wouldn’t.

He had no trouble giving his reason. Adolf Hitler is the enemy of the UK, he wrote. I will not serve with German soldiers, or under German officers. He thought for a moment. That covered most of it, but not all. He added, It is wrong for any British soldier to do so. He nodded. Better now. He’d taken care of why he didn’t want to stay in even if they said he didn’t have to go to Russia himself.

He’d expected that resigning from the service would take a lot of paperwork. He hadn’t expected it to take as much as it did. He waded through one form after another. It all boiled down to I’ve done my bit, and I don’t want to play any more as long as I have to play on Adolf’s side.

“Here,” he said at last. He signed his name for the final time-he hoped it was for the final time!-and shoved the sheaf of papers back across the counter at the personnel sergeant.

That worthy went through them to make sure Walsh had crossed every i and dotted every t. He didn’t find anything missing, which seemed to disappoint him. When he’d examined the last form, he asked, “Have you any idea what you’ll do after leaving his Majesty’s service?”

“Not the foggiest notion,” Walsh answered, more cheerfully than he felt. “Something will turn up before I land on the dole. I hope so, any road. If all else fails, maybe I’ll go to Spain. I hear the Republic is still taking on men who want to fight for her.”

The way the personnel sergeant curled his lip said what he thought of that. It also said he’d watched a lot of aristocratic officers and was doing his best to imitate them. It was the kind of sneer that tempted Walsh to say the hell with Spain and to go sign on with the Red Army instead. Any man who didn’t turn a bit Bolshie when he saw a sneer like that wasn’t worth the paper he was printed on.

“You’d sooner fight for a pack of wogs than your own country?” the personnel sergeant said. It was that kind of sneer. Oswald Mosley would have been proud of it-which was, in its own way, a measure of Mosley’s damnation.

“No, I’d sooner fight for my own country, all right,” Walsh said, wondering how long that punch in the nose could be delayed. “But I’m not about to fight for the Fuhrer. They aren’t the same thing, and it doesn’t matter if the Prime Minister says they are. I know a damned lie when I hear one. I don’t care who comes out with it, either.”

Even under the rather dim bulbs that lit the personnel office, he could see the other sergeant go red. “It’s just as well that you’re getting out,” the man said.

“You bet it is,” Walsh agreed. He started to turn away, then paused. “When does it become official?”

“Oh, you’re out. Don’t fret yourself over that,” the personnel sergeant said. “The gents who run things, they don’t want your kind in. You can take that to the bank, you can.”

For upwards of twenty years, officers had been telling Walsh that men like him were the backbone of the British Army. His fitness reports had shown the same thing. All the same, he didn’t doubt the personnel sergeant for a minute. Men who were not only able to think for themselves but insisted on doing so were dangerous-at least to their superiors’ peace of mind-in any army.

Walsh left the personnel office with his last fortnight’s pay and his provisional discharge papers in hand. He wondered if London would look different now that he was a civilian. It didn’t, not so far as he could tell. A crew of men in uniform was hauling down a barrage balloon. No one expected Russian air raids, and people didn’t have to worry about Hitler any more. Wasn’t life grand?

Part of it was: no one could give him orders now. On the other hand, he needed to start worrying about bed and board… and everything else. What was he going to do now? As he’d told the personnel sergeant, he hadn’t the faintest idea. But he wouldn’t do anything because some damn Fritz told him to. As far as he was concerned, that mattered most.

The train rolled into Germany. German soldiers-or maybe they were just frontier guards; their uniforms looked funny-waved to the French soldiers inside. Some of the poilus waved back.

Luc Harcourt muttered in disgust. To hell with him if he’d do anything like that. Most of the fellows who waved were new fish. They hadn’t come up against German tanks and artillery and machine guns and dive bombers and grenades and… The list went on and on. They hadn’t come up against Germans, was what it boiled down to. Luc had. Politics might put him on the same side as the Feldgrau bastards, but politics couldn’t make him like them.

Beside him, Lieutenant Demange chain-smoked Gitanes. He would have done that anywhere, probably including church. “I wish I never would have come along for this, you know?” Luc said.

“Yeah, yeah. Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” Demange gave out as much sympathy as he usually did: none. “You should have let the pox eat off your foreskin. Then they would have thought you were a kike and given you something else to do.”

“You love everybody, don’t you?”

“But of course.” The cigarette in the corner of Demange’s mouth jerked as he spoke. It always did. Somehow, it never fell out, even when it got so small the coal was about to singe his lips.

“Well, come on. Did you ever figure we’d be fighting with the Nazis and not trying to blow their heads off?”

“No, but I’m not that surprised, either. Cochons we’ve got running things, they were always scared to death of another war with Germany. That’s how come we’ve got the Maginot Line. That’s how come Daladier went to fucking Munich: to hand Hitler the Sudetenland. But Hitler went to war anyhow, so we got sucked in. The good thing about fighting the Russians is, they’ve got to go all the way through Germany before they can bother us.”

“Oh, no, they don’t. We’re going to them,” Luc said.

Demange waved that aside. “You know what I mean. Think like a Paris politico. If the Germans took the place, they’d grab your mistress and her flat, and you’d be stuck in the provinces with your wife.” He rolled his eyes at the inexpressible horror of the idea.

“Wonderful. Fucking marvelous,” Luc said. “I’d sooner be a politico stuck with a fat, fifty-year-old wife than a poilu on his way to Russia to get his dick shot off.”

“But the politicos don’t give a shit what you’d sooner.” Demange pointed out that basic truth with a certain savage gusto all his own. “And they’ve got tough bastards like me to make good and sure you do like they tell you.”

“You’re on your way to Russia to get your dick shot off, too,” Luc observed. “What good does being a politico’s watchdog do you?”

“Hey, I still get to tell all the sorry cons under me what to do,” Demange answered. “Now that the dumb fucks went and made me an officer, I get to tell more sorry assholes what to do than ever.”

“Doesn’t help when the artillery starts coming in,” Luc said.

For once, he might have got under Demange’s armored hide. “Ahh, shut up,” the older man said. Because he was an officer and Luc only a sergeant, Luc had to do as he was told.

In due course, they passed from Germany into Poland. Luc had never heard French spoken with a Polish accent before. German-accented French was a joke-a nervous joke, but a joke. Luc remembered a prewar cartoon of Hitler holding out a French translation of Mein Kampf and going, “Barlons vrancais.” The way he butchered the French for We speak French gave his words the lie. But French with a Polish twist sounded extra weird-along with odd pronunciation, the Poles put the accent for every multisyllable word on the next to last.

And Poland looked weird, too. It wasn’t the people Luc saw from the windows as the troop train rolled through towns (well, except for the black-hatted, long-coated, bearded Jews, who seemed like refugees from another time). It wasn’t even the towns themselves. None of them would turn into Paris any time soon, but no provincial French towns would, either. It was the countryside. There was too much of it, and it was too flat.

“What did they do to get it like this?” he asked Demange. If the veteran didn’t know everything, he sure didn’t admit it. “It looks like somebody ironed the whole place.”

“We spent billions of francs building the Maginot Line, like I was talking about a few days ago,” Demange answered. “How much do you suppose the Poles would have to lay out to make themselves some mountain ranges?”

Luc hadn’t looked at it like that. After a moment’s thought, he nodded. “Yeah, that’s about what it would take, isn’t it?” He clicked his tongue between his teeth as another kilometer of plain rolled by. “But what happens because they can’t make mountains?”

Lieutenant Demange’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a horrible grin. “What happens? I’ll tell you what happens, my little cabbage.” He made as if to pat Luc on the cheek. Luc knocked his hand away. Unfazed, Demange finished, “Germans and Russians happen, that’s what.”

“Mm.” Luc nodded again. “Must be fun being a Pole, huh?”

“Well, some of the broads aren’t half bad,” Demange said, and Luc nodded one more time. Some of the women he’d seen were spectacular beauties, with more stuff to hold on to than you could shake a stick at. But, again, Demange wasn’t done. He gave his verdict with the air of a judge passing sentence: “Except for that, you couldn’t pay me enough to be a Pole.”

Once more, Luc didn’t care to try to tell him he was wrong. When the people running your country saw the Nazis as the lesser of two evils-and when they might well prove right-you were, not to put too fine a point on it, in deep shit.

Once they got east of Warsaw, they started passing through country that had been fought over. It all looked much too familiar to Luc: the wrecked farmhouses, the untended fields, the rusting hulks of tanks and trucks, the cratered ground, the occasional crashed airplane, the hasty graves marked by homemade wooden crosses or just by rifles topped with helmets. The farther east they went, the worse the fighting looked to have been.

Then things changed again. Without warning, signs stopped making any sense at all. Luc could no more understand Polish than he could fly, but he could try to sound out the incomprehensible words. Chances were he was botching them worse than Poles botched French, but he could try. When the alphabet itself stopped meaning anything…

When the alphabet itself stopped meaning anything, they weren’t in Poland any more. They were in the USSR. The Germans had the same problem here. Luc saw quite a few of their signs importantly pointing this way and that, stark black letters on a snowy ground. He didn’t read German, either, though more of the words looked familiar than they did in Polish. But even seeing letters he could understand felt oddly reassuring.

The train stopped. Luc expected silence outside the car now that the noise from the engine and the wheels was gone. Instead, he heard something like far-off thunder. Somebody’s artillery was going to town.

Lieutenant Demange gave him that dreadful grin again. “Well, we won’t have to go real far to find the front, will we?”

“No. What a pity,” Luc said, for all the world as if he meant it. Demange’s sour chuckle said he understood.

A German officer came up to the detraining Frenchmen and immediately started shouting orders-in his own language, of course. None of the soldiers in khaki moved. Luc knew that, even if he did speak German, he would sooner lose a nut than admit it. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one here who felt that way.

His government could make him board a train. It could ship him east. But it couldn’t turn him into a good ally. If the Germans didn’t happen to like that, well… What a pity. For the first time since stepping down onto Soviet soil, he smiled.

A dormouse might find room to sleep inside a Panzer II. An ordinary human being didn’t stand a chance. Theo Hossbach and his crewmates did the next best thing: they dug out a space under the little panzer, using its armored chassis and tracks to protect them from anything the Ivans threw their way.

It was crowded under there, but less crowded than inside the machine. Not so many sharp metal corners to catch you in the knee or the elbow or the side of the head, either. And Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt got along pretty well. They shared cigarettes and food and, whenever they could liberate some, vodka.

“I didn’t like those clouds late this afternoon,” Stoss said as they were settling down. “Looked like rain.”

“Smelled like rain, too. Still does,” Witt put in, wrinkling his nose in the fading, gloomy light. “Wet dust-know what I mean?”

Adi nodded. So did Theo. One of the reasons you dug in under your panzer was to give the beast room to settle. If the ground was soft, it could settle enough to squash you flat unless you were careful. And, of course, it would settle more if rain softened things.

But they’d dug enough of a cave so they wouldn’t have to worry about that. Which didn’t mean Theo didn’t worry. Theo always worried. He had reason to worry here, too. When the fall rains started in this part of the world, they didn’t stop for six weeks or so. All the roads that weren’t paved turned to bottomless lengths of ooze. The next paved road Theo saw more than a couple of kilometers outside a Soviet city would be the first.

That was on the panzer commander’s mind, too. “You know, our maps eat shit,” he remarked, not quite apropos of nothing.

“You bet,” Adi Stoss agreed. “What they call main highways are horrible dirt tracks. And the secondary roads-the ones on the maps, I mean-mostly aren’t there at all for real.”

“The railroads suck, too,” Witt said. Once soldiers started bitching, they commonly had a hard time stopping. “Why did the fucking Ivans pick a wider gauge than everybody else in Europe?”

“So we couldn’t use our rolling stock on their lines when a war started,” Adi answered. “It works, too.”

By the same token, the Russians couldn’t use their cars and engines farther to the west. Their planners must have been afraid they were more likely to retreat than to advance when they banged heads with Germany. On the evidence of two wars, those planners had known what to fear.

Theo pulled his blanket over his head. Adi and Hermann kept talking for a while, but they lowered their voices. Theo fell asleep as if sledgehammered. Anybody who said war wasn’t a wearing business had never been through one.

He woke early the next morning to a soft, insistent drumming on the panzer overhead and on the ground all around. No wonder it had looked like rain the afternoon before. No, no wonder at all. His lips shaped a soundless word: “Scheisse.”

His comrades stirred a few minutes later. They swore, too, not at all silently. “Break out the soup spoons,” Adi said. “The easy advances just quit being easy.”

“Maybe things will pick up again after the hard freeze comes and we aren’t stuck in the mud all the goddamn time.” Witt tried to look on the bright side of things.

“Yeah, maybe.” Adi didn’t sound as if he believed it. Theo didn’t believe it, either. Just then, a tiny rill trickled down the dirt they’d thrown up from under the panzer and into their little cave. Adi sighed theatrically. “Forty days and forty nights-isn’t that right?”

It was right in the Biblical sense. It was also about how long the fall rains in Russia would last. The panzer crewmen glumly emerged into a world that had changed.

The rain pattered down out of a sky that reminded Theo of nothing so much as the bellies of a lot of dirty sheep. It cut visibility to a couple of hundred meters at best. Beyond that, everything was lost in a curtain of murk and mist. A hooded crow on the roof of a burnt-out barn sent the Germans a nasty look, as if to say the evil weather was their fault.

Sorry, bird, Theo thought. It’s not us. Our generals will be tearing out their hair-the ones who still have hair, anyhow. The rest will throw down their monocles and cuss. His opinion of the Wehrmacht ’s senior commanders was not high. His opinion of other armies’ leadership was even lower.

Adi stooped and eyed the Panzer II’s tracks. Sure as hell, it was getting muddy. Sure as hell, the panzer was sinking into the mud. The driver mournfully shook his head. “Going anywhere in this crap will be fun, won’t it?” he said.

Witt nodded to Theo. “Get on the horn with the regiment,” he said. “See what we’re supposed to do today. If we’re lucky, they’ll tell us to hold in place.”

“Right,” Theo said. The panzer commander didn’t sound as if he expected them to be lucky. Since Theo didn’t, either, he just climbed into the panzer and warmed up the radio set.

When he asked headquarters what the day’s orders were, the sergeant or lieutenant at the other end of the connection seemed surprised he needed to. “No changes since last night,” the fellow back at HQ replied. “The advance continues. Why?”

“It’s raining,” Theo said. For all he knew, it wasn’t back there. Or, if it was, the deep thinkers at headquarters might not have noticed.

“We go forward,” the man at headquarters said. Theo duly relayed his words of wisdom to Witt and Adi.

“Well, we try,” remarked the panzer commander, who had a firmer grip on reality than anybody back at HQ. He nodded to Adi. “Start her up.”

“Right you are,” Stoss said. The Maybach engine belched itself awake. It should have had more horsepower, but it was reliable enough.

The panzer should have had more armor. It should have had a better gun. It should have been a Panzer III, in other words. But there still weren’t enough IIIs and IVs to go around, so the smaller IIs and even Is soldiered on.

Witt stood head and shoulders out of the cupola. He draped his shelter half so it kept most of the rain off of him and out of the fighting compartment. “We’re kicking up a wake,” he reported, sounding more amused than annoyed.

Theo, as usual, couldn’t see out. He believed Witt, though. The engine labored to push the panzer through the mud. The tracks dug in hard. Even through the panzer’s steel sides, Theo could hear the squelching.

And the going only got worse. Theirs wasn’t the only panzer trying to use the road. The more traffic it took, the more ruts filled with water and turned to soup. “I wonder if we’d do better in the fields,” Adi said.

“Try it if you want to,” Witt told him.

“Damned if I won’t,” the driver said, and he did. The panzer picked up speed-for a little while. Then it came to a stretch that German or Russian artillery had already chewed up. Rainwater had soaked into the shell holes, producing little gluey puddles. Adi carefully picked his way between them. “We’re using more gas than we have been, too,” he grumbled.

Again, Theo believed him. The engine was working much harder than it had when the road was dry. How anyone was supposed to fight in weather like this… He consoled himself by remembering that the Russians would have just as much trouble seeing enemies and moving as his own side did.

That turned out not to be quite true. The Panzer II was fighting to get out of a mudhole when Witt let out a horrified squawk and all but fell back into the turret. He frantically traversed it to the left. “Goddamn Russian panzer!” he explained. “Fucker’s plowing through the mud like it isn’t even there.”

How fast were the Ivans turning their turret this way? Theo’s gut knotted. A 45mm shell slamming through the thin side armor might answer the question any second now. Witt started shooting: one 20mm round after another, as fast as the toy cannon would fire. Then he switched to the coaxial machine gun, and Theo breathed again.

“Bastard’s burning,” the panzer commander said. “I think the machine gun got one of the crew, but the rest are still on the loose.” He laughed shakily. “Never a dull moment, is there?… How are we doing, Adi?”

“We’re fucking stuck, that’s how,” Stoss answered. “We need a tow.”

“Right,” Witt said. “Theo, get on the radio. Let ’em know.”

“I’m doing it,” Theo said. He hoped whatever recovery vehicle the regiment sent out wouldn’t bog down before it got here. And he hoped-he really, really hoped-no more Russian panzers would come along first.

Rasputitsa. Russian had a word for the season of mud that came along every spring and fall. The spring rasputitsa was worse, because it didn’t mark rain alone: the accumulated winter snow melted, making the mud deeper and gooier yet. But the fall mud time was bad enough.

No planes flew. During the winter, fighters and even bombers landed with skis in place of wheels. Even that didn’t work during the rasputitsa. To get airborne and come down again, a plane had to use a paved runway. As far as Sergei Yaroslavsky knew, the Soviet Union didn’t have any.

The Germans were grounded, too. Poland had a few all-weather airstrips, but the front had moved too far east for them to matter. Sergei chuckled sourly. Advantages to everything, even defeat.

For the next few weeks, the flyers had nothing to do but sit around, play cards, and drink. A Red Air Force man sober through the rasputitsa probably had something wrong with his liver. When the hard freezes came, when planes could take off and land again, that would be time enough to get your nose out of the vodka jug.

Now… Now Sergei ate and slept and drank and argued and listened to the radio and argued some more. Even drunk, he was careful about what he said. NKVD men got drunk too, but they had an ugly habit of remembering what they’d heard then even after they sobered up.

The war ground on even while Sergei and the rest of the Red Air Force men perforce vegetated. That was why he listened to the radio: to find out what was going on while he couldn’t do anything about it. He pored over the copies of Pravda and Izvestia and Red Star that came to the airstrip, even if they commonly got there a week after they were printed, their cheap paper already starting to yellow.

No one wanted to come straight out and say so, but the Germans and Poles were still pushing forward-not so fast as before, but they were. The first sighting of French troops raised a fine fury on the radio and then, after the usual delays, in the papers, too. The Party line raised echoes of the civil war after the October Revolution when the capitalist powers allied with the reactionary Whites to try to murder the Soviet Union at birth. They’d failed then, and they would fail now… if you listened to Stalin’s propagandists, at any rate.

Back then, Japan had joined with England, France, America, and the Whites against the USSR. For a long time, the radio had made this war with Japan seem more of the same thing. We’re attacked on all sides, so we need to fight and work twice as hard, was the message.

That had been the message, anyhow. But a two-paragraph item in Izvestia that Sergei almost ignored said Foreign Commissar Litvinov was on a diplomatic mission to Khabarovsk. It didn’t say what kind of diplomatic mission or with whom he was conducting his diplomacy. But still… Khabarovsk!

You had to know where Khabarovsk was for the story to make any sense. As it happened, Sergei did. When he was a little kid, some school lesson had praised Khabarovsk, the jewel of eastern Siberia. The so-called jewel was probably one more Soviet industrial town, a quarter of the way around the world from where he sat now. That wasn’t the point.

The point was, why would Maxim Litvinov be conducting diplomacy in Khabarovsk if not to talk some more with the Japanese? He wouldn’t meet British or French officials there-that was for sure. But Khabarovsk was pretty close to Japan-and even closer to Japan’s recent Siberian conquests. Nothing else made sense.

Which proved… what, exactly? Not a damned thing, as Sergei also knew. He was only a flyer, making guesses from what the government deigned to tell the people. What the men who ran things knew that they weren’t telling… He could guess about that, too, but he was much too likely to be wrong.

Only he wasn’t wrong, not this time. One very wet, very muddy, very hung-over morning, the radio newsreader followed “Moscow speaking” with “I have the honor to present an important announcement from General Secretary Stalin concerning the course of the struggle against imperialism.”

Sergei went over to the samovar and got himself a glass of hot, strong, sweet tea. Then he poured a hefty slug of vodka into it. Put that all together and it might take the edge off his headache. He wasn’t the only flyer medicating himself that way, either-nowhere close. Some skipped the tea.

Then the newsreader said, “A definitive and lasting peace has been reached between the Empire of Japan and the workers and peasants of the USSR. The two nations, recognizing their common interests, have decided to make permanent the cease-fire to which they agreed when Foreign Commissar Litvinov traveled to Japan this summer. They will end their conflict on the basis of current positions. The new borders will be demilitarized on both sides to a distance of twenty-five kilometers. Each nation also pledges neutrality in the other’s current and future conflicts. The Foreign Commissar has expressed great satisfaction as a result of the formal termination of hostilities.”

“Good. That’s good,” Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko said. “In fact, very good. Ochen khorosho. ” He repeated the last two words with somber satisfaction as he stubbed out one papiros and lit another. He seemed to be one of those people who thought nicotine eased a pain in the hair-a term Sergei’d heard from a fellow flyer who’d served in Spain. It fit, all right. He’d smoked a couple of cigarettes himself, but just because he smoked, not because he thought they made much difference to his morning-afters.

Several flyers nodded. Even under Socialism, you couldn’t go far wrong agreeing with your squadron commander-and, more to the point, being seen to agree with him. Sergei only wished he could. But the newsreader had left too much out. He hadn’t said where the new borders were, for instance. That argued that Japan had seized more of southeastern Siberia than anyone cared to admit in public. The announcer hadn’t said anything about returning prisoners of war, either.

Maybe none of that mattered. With the Soviet Union officially able to concentrate on the west, Stalin probably planned to hang on here and renew the fight in the Far East when he saw the chance. He couldn’t let Japan hold on to Vladivostok… could he?

And what would Japan do now? She could put more soldiers into China. She plainly thought of the vast, disorderly country the way England thought of India: a place to exploit, with plenty of natives to do the hard work for her.

Come to think of it, Hitler thought of Russia that way. What else was he doing here but grabbing land and slaves? If he won this war, he would get his way. The thing to do, then, was make sure he didn’t.

Sergei took another swig of vodka-laced tea. His headache was backing off-some, anyhow. He couldn’t fight the Nazis now, not with the best will in the world. The rasputitsa made sure of that. It left him feeling more than commonly useless.

It was hard to remember, but across the sea lay a country where none of this mattered. The United States was the greatest capitalist nation in the world, and it was at peace with everybody. That struck Sergei as most unfair-all the more so when he was hung over. The Americans just sat there watching the rest of the world tear itself to pieces. As far as the pilot could tell, they didn’t care. Why should they? No matter who won, they got rich selling grain and guns.

Something should happen to them. It would serve them right, he thought. Then he laughed at himself. What could happen to the United States? The Americans had beaten their natives far more completely than the English had won in India or the Japanese in China. The Atlantic and Pacific shielded them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. They even seemed immune to the inexorable working of the historical dialectic.

He brought himself up sharply. The Americans might seem immune, but they weren’t. Nobody was. The revolution would come to the United States, too. The big capitalists and exploiters would go to the wall, as they had in the USSR. It would happen in England and France, too-and in Germany, no matter what the Hitlerites thought or how little they liked it.

But when? The dialectic didn’t speak to that. For the USSR’s sake, Sergei hoped it would be soon.