West and East

Chapter 20

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

What the devil was that from? For the life of her, Peggy Druce couldn't remember. She'd studied way too much literature in college, but how much good did it do her? She could remember the quote, but not the source. Her professors would have frowned severely.

Well, tough shit, she thought. Even if she couldn't remember who'd written the line, it fit her all too well. The Nazis had even extended their hell to keep her in it. She'd thought getting into Denmark meant escaping. Sadly, just because you thought something didn't make it so.

No more flights from Copenhagen to London. No more ships plying the North Sea from Denmark to England, either. The Nazis were acting as mildly as anybody could after invading and overrunning the country next door. They loudly proclaimed that Denmark was still independent. If you listened to them, they were only protecting the Danes from invasion by England or France.

If.

Had any Danes invited them to protect the country? "Not fucking likely!" Peggy said out loud when she first thought to wonder. She was having lunch in a seaside cafe at the moment. Her waiter did a double take worthy of Groucho. Peggy's cheeks heated. She'd already seen that a lot of Danes spoke English. Quite a few of them spoke it better than your average American, in fact. She couldn't just let fly without scandalizing somebody. She left the waiter a fat tip and got out of there in a hurry.

Moments later, she wished she hadn't. A couple of dozen Danish Fascists were parading down the street behind a Danish flag-white cross on red-with the words FRIKORPS DANMARK in gold where the stars would be on an American flag. She wasn't the only person staring at the collaborators. Every country had its Fascist fringe, but now the Danish loonies enjoyed Hitler's potent backing.

Slowly and deliberately, a tall blonde woman turned her back on the homegrown Fascists. One by one, the rest of the people on the street followed her example. Peggy was slower than most. She got a good look at the Danish would-be Nazis. By their expressions, they might have bitten into big, juicy lemons.

From behind them, somebody called out something in Danish. Peggy didn't understand it, but the local traitors did. Their faces got even more sour. She hadn't dreamt they could. More and more people took up the call, whatever it was. As the Fascists rounded a corner and disappeared, a helpful Dane who must have noticed Peggy's blank look spoke a few words of English: "It means 'Shame!'-what we shouted."

"Good for you!" she said. If she'd known the word, she would have yelled at the goons herself.

The worst of it was, she had to deal with the Germans again. Her disappointment seemed all the crueler because she'd thought she'd escaped both Nazis and Wehrmacht forever. No such luck. No luck at all, as a matter of fact. The Germans might say Denmark was still independent, but the "free" Danes had no control over travel between their country and neighboring Sweden. The occupiers damn well did.

Knowing Nazi arrogance, Peggy would have expected the Wehrmacht to take over the royal palace and to run Denmark from it. But General Kaupitsch or his aide had better sense than that. King Christian X went right on reigning. Even his Danish bodyguard remained intact. The Germans administered their new conquest from a drab modern office building three blocks away.

If that was where they were, that was where Peggy had to go. She wished Hitler had issued her a letter instead of calling her on the phone to let her know she could go from Germany to Denmark. (And had he been laughing up his sleeve when he gave her that permission? Sure he had! He must have known his own army would be only a few days behind her.)

No big swastika flag flew over or in front of the German headquarters. The Wehrmacht wasn't going out of its way to be hated… unless you counted invading Denmark to begin with, of course. Peggy would have bet the Germans didn't. She had no doubt whatsoever that the Danes damn well did, and always would.

She displayed her American passport and told one of the sentries, "I want to see General Kaupitsch. Sofort, bitte." Sofort sounded a lot more immediate than immediately.

"Why?" one of the Germans asked. Under the beetling brow of his helmet, his features were blank.

"Because the Fuhrer said I could come to Denmark so I could go on to the States, and this invasion has screwed things up. That's why," Peggy answered. "Do you understand that?" Or shall I bounce a rock off your goddamn Stahlhelm and wise you up?

Both sentries' eyes widened. One set was blue, the other brown. You're a crappy Aryan, kid, Peggy thought, feeling how far out on the ragged edge she was. "Please wait," the one with the blue eyes said. He disappeared into the office building.

If he didn't come out pretty damn quick, Peggy was going to lay into his buddy with both barrels. But he did. He conferred with Brown Eyes, who spoke up: "I will take you to Major von Rehfeld."

"Oh, yeah? How come not to the general?"

"I am ordered to take you to Major von Rehfeld." For a German, nothing else needed saying. "You will please come with me."

Peggy please came with him. Major von Rehfeld proved to be a tall, handsome man of about thirty-five who was missing the lower half of his left ear. That and a wound badge said he'd seen real fighting somewhere. "So you are the notorious Mrs. Druce," he said in excellent English.

"That's right, buster. Who in blazes are you?" Peggy snapped.

"Among other things, I am the man assigned to get you to Stockholm," the German officer answered. "Believe me: we do respect the Fuhrer's order to give you all the help we can. Once you reach Sweden, you are on your own, however. I do not know how soon you will be able to travel from there to England and on to the United States. It is a pity, but Norway remains a war zone."

"And whose fault is that?" Peggy said.

The major shrugged. "I would say it is the fault of France and England, but I am sure you would call me a lying Nazi if I did. So I will not say anything about that. Never mind whose fault it is. It is a war zone. Nothing travels through it without grave risk of being attacked by both the two sides. Is this so, or is it not so?"

It was so. Of that Peggy had no doubt whatever. Nobody in her right mind could. "How long do you think I'll have to stay in Stockholm?" she asked.

"This I cannot say." The major spread his hands, doing his best to look and sound as reasonable as he could. "It is not up to the Reich alone, you know. The enemy has also something to say about it. I can tell you that we are making much better progress in Norway than we were only a few days ago. We prove that air power is stronger than sea power. The Royal Navy is sorry to learn this, but learn it they do."

Maybe that was so, too. Or maybe he was parroting Goebbels' propaganda line as if it were Polly wants a cracker! Peggy couldn't tell. Since she couldn't, she asked, "How do I get to Stockholm?"

"The usual ferry is sailing again. Tickets are easy to come by. You will have no trouble with an exit visa-I promise you that," Major von Rehfeld replied.

"Will you have German soldiers on the ferry, the way you did on the ships in Copenhagen harbor?" Peggy gibed.

To her astonishment, the major blushed scarlet. "We saved needless bloodshed," he said, but he sounded none too proud of it. A moment later, he added, "It was a legitimate ruse of war," but that didn't seem to convince him, either.

If he meant what he said about getting her to Stockholm, Peggy wasn't inclined to be fussy. "How soon can I go?" she asked.

"As soon as you have your ticket, come back. I will provide you with an exit visa. No one will stand in your way," von Rehfeld said.

"You aren't planning to, uh, protect Sweden as soon as I get there, are you?"

"Why would we? With Denmark and Norway safe from English interference, iron ore can travel from Sweden to the Reich without risk of interruption."

Had the major claimed that Germany would never do such a wicked thing, Peggy wouldn't have believed him for a minute. When he talked about national self-interest, he was much more persuasive. That didn't mean he was telling the truth. It also didn't mean Peggy would be able to get out of Sweden once she got in. But she was willing to try it. What can go wrong now? she asked herself. But the question had a simple, obvious answer. Damn near anything could. SERGEANT HERMANN WITT MADE a panzer commander very different from Heinz Naumann. Theo Hossbach noted the differences with nothing but relief. Most important, Witt could laugh at himself. He didn't have to feel he was better and tougher than everyone else in the panzer to give orders. He didn't go out of his way to give people a hard time to show he was tougher than they were.

If that came as a relief to Theo, it had to be something close to heaven for Adalbert Stoss. Witt hadn't taken long to realize the driver was missing something most German men had. Imagining three men living closer together than they did in a Panzer II was next to impossible. Theo sure didn't want to think about it, anyhow. Only bedbugs and lice lived closer to him than his crewmates did.

Naumann hadn't been able to quit riding Adi Stoss about his circumcision. No wonder they hadn't got along. Theo wouldn't have wanted anybody razzing him about his dick, either. A couple of days after taking charge of the panzer, Witt looked up from the skinny little chicken he was roasting and said, "Ask you something, Adi?"

"Sure, Sarge. What's up?" Stoss answered-about how Theo would have responded to a casual question.

"When they drafted you-"

"They didn't, Sarge. I volunteered."

"Did you? Well, all right. Good for you. When you did, you filled out about a million forms, right?" Witt said.

Adi nodded and made a face. "Sure. Pain in the ass, but you've got to do it."

"Yeah. You do. You gave all the right answers on the one about your ancestors, didn't you?" the new panzer commander said.

Stoss didn't even try not to understand him. "You bet I did-in spite of the operation, if you know what I mean."

"I expect I do," Sergeant Witt replied. "That's what I needed to know." He turned the chicken's carcass on the branch that did duty for a spit. "And I think this bird's about ready to eat. White meat or dark?"

As Theo gnawed the meat off a drumstick and thigh, he belatedly realized Witt hadn't asked Adi if he was a Jew. He'd only asked if the driver had given the right answers on the military paperwork. Of course Adi had. They wouldn't have let him into the Wehrmacht if he hadn't. But the question covered the sergeant's ass. If by some chance Stoss did turn out to be Jewish, Witt could say the driver had denied it.

Theo'd wondered himself. Yes, some gentiles did have a medical need to part with their foreskin. But if you ran into somebody without his, what would you think first? You'd think the guy was a Jew, that was what.

The idea made Theo want to giggle. A Jew in the Wehrmacht was like a chameleon on a green rug. You wouldn't look for one on the rug to begin with, so of course you wouldn't notice it if it happened to be there. Theo wouldn't have said anything about his wonderings, even if the Gestapo decided to interrogate him. He never said much about anything. And he had his reasons not to. When you didn't love the regime under which you lived, keeping your mouth shut was the smartest thing you could do.

Besides, if Adi really was Jewish, wasn't that about the richest joke anyone could play on the Nazis? Theo might have thought otherwise if Stoss were a bad soldier, or a gutless one. He wasn't. He did fine. As long as he made a good Kamerad, who gave a rat's ass about the other crap?

With sizable help from the Polish infantry-which seemed to view retreat as a worse affront than treason-it looked as if they'd be able to hold the Red Army outside of Warsaw. The Poles had managed that after the last war, too. If they hadn't, Germany and Russia might not be quarreling on Polish soil right now. They'd be at each other's throats, the way they had been in 1914.

Quite a few Polish foot soldiers were obviously Jews. What did they think of fighting on the same side as the German National Socialists? Theo was tempted to ask some of them. A German who put some effort into it could make sense of Yiddish. In the end, though, the radioman kept his mouth shut. That was what he usually did, so it wasn't hard for him. And his sense of self-preservation warned him his fellow soldiers would give him funny looks if he all of a sudden started chatting up Jews.

Some of the villages they went through were full of them: men in beards, wide-brimmed hats, and black clothes straight out of the eighteenth century. One of the guys from another panzer in the company said, "Boy, you can sure see why the Fuhrer wants to clean out the kikes, can't you? They're like something from Mars. Shame we can't wipe these places up any which way."

"Poles wouldn't like it," another crewman said.

"My ass," the first fellow replied. "They don't like Jews any better'n we do-less, maybe. I bet they'd cheer us on."

"Maybe," the other man said. "But then all the kikes would go over to the Reds. We need that like a hole in the head."

"I guess," the first man said unwillingly. "Their day's coming, though. It's gotta be. I mean, they're like niggers or Chinamen or something, only they don't even live a long piss away from us."

Theo glanced over at Adi. The panzer driver kept his head down and shoveled stew into his face from his mess tin. That meant exactly nothing. Most of the Germans in black coveralls were doing exactly the same thing.

A sergeant with the ribbon for an Iron Cross Second Class and a wound badge said, "The less people who want to shoot me or plant mines or pour sugar in my gas tank, the better I like it."

No one seemed eager to quarrel with that. Theo knew damn well he wasn't. He hadn't liked it when the French shot at him. His own wound badge-and the half a finger he could still feel sometimes even if it wasn't there any more-said he had good reason not to argue. The Czechs could have done the same to him, or even worse. The Russians might yet.

They got another chance the next morning. A Polish cavalryman rode back to warn the crew that enemy panzers lay ahead. The Poles called them pancers, pronouncing it the same way German did. To the Russians, they were tanks; they'd borrowed the word from English instead.

"Big pancers," the horseman warned. The Poles used cavalry as if they'd never heard of machine guns. Their riders had more balls than they knew what to do with. To an outside observer, that often made them nutty as so many fruitcakes. Germans who'd been in Poland longer than Theo talked about horsemen in the square-topped caps called czapkas charging Russian panzers with lances. Maybe that was true, maybe not. That Theo could wonder spoke volumes about what Polish cavalry might be capable of.

"Well, let's see how big they are," Hermann Witt said. "Forward, Adi. Take it slow till we find out what we're up against."

"Will do," Stoss said, and he did. Back in his own armored space, Theo might not find out how big the enemy panzers were till a shell hit the Panzer II and either did or didn't smash the soft-skinned people inside and set the machine on fire. He wondered if getting surprised by death was worse than seeing someone take dead aim at you before you got it. Pretty bad both ways, as a matter of fact.

"Ha!" Sergeant Witt said, and then, "Those damned fast panzers, Theo. Report 'em to division."

Theo did. His gut clenched. No way in hell the Panzer II's armor could hold out a 45mm round. But this machine had teeth, too. Witt fired several short bursts from the 20mm gun. His shouts and whoops and curses said he was doing some good.

Adi's voice came through the speaking tube: "They're running away!"

A couple of other German panzers had come forward with theirs. All the same, Theo wasn't sorry to hear Witt say, "I think I'm just going to let them go. You borrow trouble, half the time you're sorry later on. More than half."

Heinz Naumann would have charged after the Reds. Theo was sure of that. He was also sure Heinz was dead. They still hadn't scrubbed all the former commander's blood off the floor of the fighting compartment; it clung in cracks and crevices. Neither Theo nor Adi had said anything about that to Sergeant Witt. Theo knew he didn't intend to. He didn't know whether Adi Stoss had equal discretion. No, he didn't know, but he thought so. INSHORE WATERS. Julius Lemp didn't like them for beans. He didn't need his Zeiss glasses to see the corrugated Norwegian coastline. The ocean deepened swiftly as you moved away from the outlets to the fjords, but not fast enough to suit him. If you had to dive in waters like these, you couldn't dive deep enough to have good odds of staying safe-and you were liable to dive straight to the bottom. That wouldn't be good, which was putting it mildly.

But this was where the fighting was, so this was where he had to be. The Royal Navy had nerve. Well, that was nothing he didn't already know. The English were ready to take on the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe both if that meant they could screw the German troops in Norway to the wall.

And the limeys were knocking the snot out of the Kriegsmarine's surface ships, too. They'd sunk nearly a dozen German destroyers, and a couple of cruisers, too. They had lost a carrier-overwhelmed and sunk by German battlewagons before she could get away. And they'd lost some destroyers of their own, but mostly to air attack. Ship against ship, the damned Englishmen were better.

On the surface. When it came to U-boats, that was a different story. It had better be, Lemp thought. Like any U-boat skipper, he felt proprietary about these boats. The Kaiser's Reich had come that close to bringing England to her knees a generation earlier. This time, the Fuhrer's Reich would do what didn't quite come off in the last war.

Lemp scanned the fjord's mouth. Smoke rose from the far end of the inlet. That was Trondheim, catching hell from the air and the ground. The town wouldn't, couldn't, stay in enemy hands much longer. The English, the French, and the Norwegians would have to retreat farther north if they wanted to stay in the fight.

RAF bombers didn't have the range to cross the North Sea and hit back at the Germans in Norway. And so the English were using warships to take up the slack. Even destroyers mounted guns usefully bigger than any a panzer carried. Those shells could mash a submarine. Lemp didn't suppose foot soldiers enjoyed getting hit with them, either.

But if you put a warship where its guns could strike ground targets, you also sent it into danger. British warships these days were painted in crazy stripes, the way zebras would have been were God drunk when He made them. It did a good job of breaking up their outlines, especially when seen from the sea against a background of shore. Nothing broke up the outline of muzzle flashes, though.

Before the sound of the guns reached the U-30, Lemp said, "We'll go below." The ratings on the conning tower tumbled down into the U-boat's fetid bowels. The skipper followed. "Periscope depth!" he called as he dogged the hatch.

With any luck at all, it would be an easy stalk. The destroyer's crew would be paying attention to their targets. They'd be watching out for air attack. The Luftwaffe had hit the Royal Navy hard in these waters. How much attention would the limeys pay to submarines? With luck, not much. Yes-with.

Lemp had no intention of leaving things to luck. He swung the periscope in wide arcs to the right and left. He hadn't seen any frigates or corvettes shepherding the destroyer, but that didn't mean they weren't there. Some clever young English officer might be stalking him the way he was stalking the destroyer.

That English officer might be, but the periscope gave no sign of it. Without taking his eyes away from the periscope, Lemp asked, "You there, Gerhart?"

"Yes, I'm here," the Schnorkel expert answered. "What do you need, Skipper?"

"Nothing. I'm just glad we've got the snort, that's all." Lemp wouldn't have believed he'd ever say anything like that when the technicians first saddled his boat with the gadget. But… "We can make our approach a lot faster than we could on batteries. When I write up the action report, I'll log it."

"I've said so all along." Gerhart Beilharz sounded ready to pop his buttons with pride.

"People say all kinds of things," Lemp answered dryly. "Sometimes they're true, and sometimes they're crap. You have to find out. It's a good thing we didn't have to find out the hard way, eh?"

"Er-yes." That took some of the toploftiness out of the tall engineer.

"Torpedoes ready?" Lemp called into the speaking tube that led to the bow. The boat had an electrically powered intercom, but nothing could go wrong with the tube.

"Yes, Skipper. Four eels loaded and ready to swim." The answer came back by the same route. It sounded brassy but perfectly comprehensible.

"All right. Won't be long." Lemp fed speeds and angles to Klaus Hammerstein. The exec turned them into a firing solution. The camouflaged destroyer swelled in the periscope's reticulated field of view. She went right on shelling whatever shore target had raised her ire. No sudden evasive moves, no sign she had the faintest idea death and ruin were slipping up on her. Things were supposed to work that way. They seldom did. Every once in a while, though…

He got within a kilometer. He could have have fired at her without Hammerstein's calculations, but he was glad he had them. The Englishmen went right on with their shore bombardment. Lemp turned the periscope all about, walking in a circle there under the conning tower. No, no one was sneaking up on him.

"Fire one!" he barked. "Fire two!"

Wham!… Wham! The eels shot out of the tubes. Running time to the destroyer was a little more than a minute. Lemp watched the wakes. Both torpedoes ran straight and true. That didn't happen every time, either. Now… How long before the Englishmen saw what was coming at them? Would they have time enough for evasive action?

As the seconds ticked off, that became less and less likely. The destroyer showed sudden urgent smoke… bare seconds before the first eel slammed into her, just abaft the beam. The second hit a moment later, up near the bow. Over and through the deep rumbles of the explosions, the crew whooped and cheered.

Destroyers weren't armored. They depended on speed to keep them out of harm's way. When speed failed, they were hideously vulnerable. The first hit would have been plenty to sink that ship.

"Back's broken," Lemp reported, watching the enemy's death agonies through the periscope. "She won't stay afloat long."

"She's not far from shore. Some of her crew may make it," Lieutenant Hammerstein said. "Our boys on land can scoop them up when they take Trondheim."

Lemp didn't answer. Even in summer, the North Sea was bloody cold. He wouldn't want to have to swim ashore, with or without a life ring. He didn't think the destroyer would be able to launch her boats. Those might have given the limey sailors a fighting chance to live. If the exec wanted to imagine he hadn't just helped kill a couple of hundred men, he could. Lemp knew better.

He spoke to the helmsman: "Give me course 305, Peter. We don't want to stick around, do we?"

"Folks up top might not be real happy with us if we do," the petty officer agreed. "Course 305 it is." He swung the U-boat around to the north and west, away from the Norwegian coast.

"Break out the beer!" somebody yelled. They kept some on board to celebrate sinkings and other notable events. It wouldn't be cold-the U-boat had no refrigerator-but no one would complain.

Lemp swung the periscope around through 360 degrees again. No hunters. Only ocean and the ever more distant shore. He nodded to himself. "We got away with it," he said, and the sailors cheered some more. "And England and France won't get away with trying to take Norway away from us, or with stopping the Swedes from shipping their iron ore to us through Norwegian ports."

The crew didn't cheer about that. They weren't grand strategists. Neither was Lemp, but he had some notion of how important the iron ore was. The Baltic froze in the winter, the North Sea didn't. If the Swedes were going to keep shipping the stuff when the weather got cold, they'd have to do it through Norwegian ports: through ports the enemy couldn't interfere with. Well, the Reich was taking care of that, sure enough.

One more check. No, no other Royal Navy ships in the neighborhood. "Yes," he said. "Break out the beer!" Even inside a cramped, stinking steel tube, life was good. "OUR MISSION," Colonel Borisov announced, "is to bomb Warsaw."

Most of the pilots and copilots in the squadron just sat there and listened. Some of them nodded, as if in wisdom. Sergei Yaroslavsky sat tight like the rest. The less you showed, the less they could blame you for.

"Any questions before we carry out the mission?" the squadron commander asked.

"Excuse me, Comrade Colonel, but I have one." Of course that was Anastas Mouradian. He'd never fully mastered the fine art of keeping his mouth shut.

"Well? What is it?" Borisov growled. He never wanted questions.

"Warsaw is the capital of Poland. It is a large city. Are we supposed to bomb some special part of it, or do we let the explosives come down all over?" Mouradian asked.

Borisov glared at him. Yaroslavsky wondered why-it was a perfectly good question. Maybe that was why. "The orders transmitted to me say 'Warsaw,'" the colonel answered. "They give no more detail. We shall bomb Warsaw-with your gracious permission, of course, Comrade Lieutenant."

"Oh, it's all right with me, sir," Mouradian answered, ignoring Colonel Borisov's heavy-handed sarcasm. "I just wanted to make sure of what was required of us."

"What is required of you is to do as you are told," Borisov said. "Now you have been told. Go do it, all of you." The meeting broke up immediately after that. There didn't seem to be anything left to say.

"Well, well," Mouradian remarked as he and Sergei strode toward their SB-2. The Chimp was already watching the armorers as they bombed up the plane. "Warsaw. How about that?" He sounded bright and cheerful. Maybe that was maskirovka: camouflage. Then again, maybe he'd gone out of his mind.

"As many antiaircraft guns as the Poles can beg, borrow, or steal," Yaroslavsky said. "All the fighter planes they've got that still fly. As many Messerschmitts as the Germans can spare."

"Now, Sergei, how many times have I told you?-if you're going to piss and moan about every little thing, you'll never get anywhere." The Armenian reached over and patted him on his stubbled cheek, as if he were a little boy fretting about hobgoblins under the bed. Sergei spluttered. What else could he do?

Ivan Kuchkov had already got the word, even if he wasn't at Borisov's meeting. "Warsaw, huh?" he said cheerfully. "About fucking time, if you want to know what I think. Time to start hitting those Polish cocksuckers where they live. Then they'll know better than to dick around with us."

What would he do without mat? He probably wouldn't be able to talk at all. Sergei waited till the armorers had finished their work, then climbed into the cockpit. He and Anastas ran through the preflight checklists. The engines fired up right away. He eyed the gauges. Things looked better than usual. They would, he thought darkly. He waited his turn to take off. The SB-2 seemed eager to fly. Would it be so eager to come back to the Motherland? He could only hope.

"One thing," Mouradian said consolingly as they took their place in the formation. "It's a big target. Borisov can't very well gig us for missing."

"Well," Sergei said, "no. He can gig us for getting killed, though."

"We won't have to listen to him if he does." Anastas seemed to think that was good news. He was welcome to his opinion.

The Poles and Germans were still holding the Red Army east of Warsaw. The line wasn't too different from the one Marshal Pilsudski's forces had held in the fighting after the Revolution. The stakes were higher now, though. The Soviet Union had already punished Poland then. Poland hadn't threatened the peasants' and workers' paradise any more. Smigly-Ridz's Poland and Hitler's Germany now… That was a different story. Hitler's Germany threatened everything it could reach, and its arms seemed to stretch like octopus tentacles.

Antiaircraft guns fired at them as they crossed the front. A couple of near misses made the bomber bounce in the air. "Some of those guns are ours!" Sergei said angrily. It happened every time. If it was up in the air, a lot of Russians assumed it had to be hostile. "I'd like to bomb the morons screwing around down there!"

"Do you think their replacements would be any smarter?" Mouradian asked. Sergei considered and reluctantly shook his head. The supply of damn fools was always more than equal to the demand. Then Anastas said, "What do you want to bet the Fritzes shoot at their own flyers, too?"

"Huh," Sergei said in surprise. To Russians, Germans were alarmingly capable: that was what made them so dangerous. It wasn't so easy to imagine them screwing up like ordinary human beings. But if they were so wonderful, why could you drop Germany into Russia and hardly notice where it hit?

They flew on. Poland was a big place in its own right-too big, at any rate, to have antiaircraft guns everywhere. Once they got beyond the front, things grew quiet again. All the same, Sergei wished for eyes that could see above, below, and behind the SB-2 as well as ahead-and all at the same time. It wasn't the first time he'd made that wish. You never knew where trouble would come from next.

"Well, one thing: we'll know when we get to Warsaw," Mouradian said.

"All the buildings and things underneath us, you mean?" Sergei asked.

"Mm, those, too," Anastas said. "But I was thinking, that's when they'll start shooting at us again."

"Oh." After a moment, Sergei nodded. "Yeah, they will, the bastards."

With a wry chuckle, Mouradian said, "We need to get the Chimp up here. He'd call them something that'd set 'em on fire from four thousand meters up."

"He would, wouldn't he?" Sergei agreed. "But don't let him hear you call him that. He'll throw you through a door headfirst, and he won't care that you're an officer or about what they'll do to him afterwards."

"I said it to you, not to him." And, in fact, Mouradian's hand had been over the mouthpiece of his speaking tube. In meditative tones, he went on, "I wonder what Ivan's service jacket looks like. How many times have they busted him down to private for doing things like that? How many times has he made it back to sergeant because he's brave and strong and even kind of clever when he isn't breaking heads? If only he didn't look like a chimp…"

"In that case, he'd get another nickname-Foxface or whatever suited the way he did look," Sergei answered. "Some people just naturally draw them, and he's one."

"Yes, I think so, too. Interesting that you should notice." Stas eyed him as if wondering what to make of such unexpected perceptiveness. Sergei didn't know whether to feel proud or nervous under that dark Southern scrutiny.

Then he stopped worrying about it. He had bigger things to worry about: they'd reached Warsaw's outskirts, and, sure as hell, the Poles were shooting at them from the ground. The formation loosened as all the pilots started jinking. They sped up; they slowed down. They swung left; they swung right. They climbed a little; they descended. The more trouble the Poles-the Germans?-had aiming at them, the more likely they'd make it back to base.

Jinking or not, if your number was up, it was up. A direct hit tore off half an SB-2's right wing. The stricken bomber tumbled toward the ground. Sergei flew past it before he could see whether any parachutes blossomed. That could have been me, he thought, and shuddered.

There lay the Vistula, shining in the sun. Everything built up on the other side was Warsaw proper. "Ready, Ivan?" Sergei called.

"Bet your stinking pussy," Kuchkov answered.

"Now!" Sergei said. If they had no orders to aim at anything in particular, he wasn't about to make a fancy straight bombing run. Why let the gunners get a good shot at him?

As soon as the bombs fell away, he hauled the SB-2's nose around and gunned it back to the east. A few more shell bursts made the plane buck in the air, but he heard-and felt-no fragments biting. And if enemy fighters were in the air, they were going after other Red Air Force formations.

"One more under our belts," Anastas Mouradian said.

"Da." Sergei nodded. Along with rubber and oil and gasoline, he could smell his own fear-and maybe Mouradian's with it. How could you go on doing this, day after day, month after month? But what they'd do to you if you tried to refuse… Yes, not flying missions was even scarier than flying them.