West and East

Chapter 8

Airplane engines droned overhead. Chaim Weinberg looked up warily, ready to dive for cover if bombs started falling. The Condor Legion, the Italians, and Marshal Sanjurjo's Spanish pilots had already given Madrid a big dose of what Paris was catching now, and what Hitler no doubt wanted to visit on London as well.

But these were Republican planes: obsolescent bombers the French could pass on for use on a less challenging front. Chaim recognized the Fascists' Junkers and Capronis at a glance. The French planes were even uglier. He wouldn't have thought it possible, but there you were.

The Spaniards on the streets knew the bombers belonged to the Republic, too. They waved and blew kisses up toward the sky, though the pilots were too high up to see them. "Kill the traitors!" someone called, and several people clapped their hands.

Mike Carroll's smile had a sour twist. "Hell of a thing to say, isn't it?" he remarked in English. "In a civil war, everybody's a traitor to somebody."

Chaim hadn't thought of it like that. He nodded, but he said, "We aren't traitors. We're just lousy mercenaries-if you believe the Nationalists."

Mike mimed scratching his head and his armpits and the seams of his trousers. "I'm not lousy right now. Don't think I am, anyway."

"Yeah, me neither," Chaim said. Fighting in and around a big city had its advantages. When you weren't actually up there trying to murder the other bastards and to keep them from murdering you, you could come back and clean up and get your clothes baked and sprayed so you wouldn't be verminous… for a while.

Bomb blasts thudded off to the northwest. Chaim and the Madrilenos on the street grinned at one another. Knowing the other guys were catching it for a change felt mighty good. Do unto others as they've been doing unto you, only more so. That might not make it into the Bible any time soon, but it was the Golden Rule of war.

"I'm gonna buy me a beer and celebrate," Mike declared, as if he thought Chaim would try to stop him.

If he did, he was out of his tree. "Sounds good," Chaim said. They didn't have to go more than half a block before they found a bar. About one business in three in Madrid seemed to sell something to help people forget their troubles. Well, people around here had a lot of troubles that needed forgetting.

No one in the dark little dive even blinked when two foreigners in ragged uniforms with rifles on their backs walked in. The skinny little guy behind the bar looked like a wall lizard with a Salvador Dali mustache. He raised one eyebrow a couple of millimeters by way of inquiring what the new patrons wanted.

"Cerveza," Carroll said, doing his damnedest to give it a proper Castilian lisp: ther-VAY-tha.

"Dos," Chaim added. His Spanish was bad, but not so bad that he couldn't get himself a beer with it.

Then the bartender said, "Okay, boys," in clear, American-accented English. As he poured, he went on, "I worked in Chicago for five years. I came back when the war started."

Chaim set coins on the bar. Mike nodded thanks. Chaim bought more often than not. The last thing he wanted was a reputation for being a cheap Jew. When the bartender started to make change, Chaim waved for him not to bother. Earlier in the war, the fellow probably would have given him his money, and a lecture to go with it. Tipping was seen as a leftover of class differences, and beneath a proper proletarian's dignity. That stern puritanism-always stronger in Barcelona than Madrid-had eased off now. The bartender nodded his thanks. He gave them the beers.

The glasses were none too clean. That would have bothered Chaim back in New York City. Not any more. Considering what all he'd eaten and drunk in the field, this was the least of his worries. He did note they were etched with the name of a German lager. That wasn't what they held now: nobody wanted to buy, or could buy, Fascist beer inside Republican territory. Fascists or not, the Germans brewed better than locals dreamt of doing. This tasted like horse piss.

But it was beer. Chaim raised his eye to the barman. "?Salud!"

"Mud in your eye," the Spaniard said gravely. "If I didn't have to eat, I'd give 'em to you on the house. You're doing my job for me now."

Something in the way he said the last word made Chaim look at him in a different way. "Spent some time at the front, did you?"

"Uh-huh. I'd still be there, only I'm standing on a peg." The bartender shrugged microscopically. "I should count my blessings. I'm still here. Plenty of guys who caught ones that didn't look so bad, they're pushing daisies now."

Mike Carroll put down a couple of pesetas. "Buy yourself one, buddy."

"Thanks." The bartender could smile, most cynically. "I'd be on my ass if I poured down all the ones people buy me. I will this time, though." He poured his own beer. "?Viva la Republica!"

"?Viva!" Chaim and Carroll echoed. Chaim drained his glass. He dug in his pocket for more coins. "Let me have another one."

"Me, too," Mike said. He grabbed Chaim's money before the bartender could and gave it back to him. "I'll buy this time."

"Thanks." Chaim nodded. Fair was fair.

Along with the beers, the barman set out olives and crackers and pork sausage the color of a new copper penny. Chaim eyed the sausage warily. He liked the stuff: what wasn't pork was garlic and peppers. But it didn't like him. Every time he ate it, it gave him the runs. He stuck to the crackers and olives.

Mike started in on the sausage as if he thought they'd outlaw it tomorrow. Maybe his guts were made of stronger stuff than Chaim's. Or maybe he'd spend the next week being sorry. You never could tell.

Two more men walked into the bar. It got quieter than it had when the Americans came in. That made Chaim look around. They weren't Spaniards or even fellow Internationals-they were a pair of genuine Soviet officers, squat and hard-faced. You didn't see them very often any more. The Russian mission in the Republic was smaller than it had been before the bigger European war broke out. Some of the men had gone home to the motherland, while hardly anyone came out to replace them. Maybe getting from Russia to Spain was harder than getting back to Russia from Spain. Or, more likely, the Soviet government just had things to worry about in its own back yard.

These fellows might have been movie actors overplaying their roles. They stomped up to the bar, barely favoring Chaim and Mike with a glance. "You give us whiskey," one of them told the bartender, as if ordering him to assault Nationalist trenches.

"And something to eat," the other one added. Spanish with a Russian accent sounded as weird as German with a Spanish accent, which Chaim had also heard.

He eyed the Soviets. One was an obvious Russian. The other… Chaim would have bet they had more than accented Spanish in common. "Nu, friend, you understand me when I talk like this?" he asked in Yiddish.

"Nu, why shouldn't I?" the Soviet said. Like a lot of Jews Chaim knew, he looked clever-maybe too clever for his own good. "Where are you from?"

"New York. You?"

"Minsk."

"One of my grandmothers came from there. Maybe we're cousins."

"Maybe." The Soviet officer didn't seem impressed. Blood might be thicker than water, but ideology was thicker than blood. Jew or not, the officer knew what mattered to him: "How long have you been here? Where have you fought?"

Mike Carroll, the barman, and the Russian were all watching the two Yehudim. Chances were none of them could follow the Yiddish. Hell, they were liable to think it was German. Well, too goddamn bad if they did. "Almost two years," Chaim said, not without pride. "I've been on the Ebro front, and lately down here." He looked a challenge to the Soviet officer. "How about you?"

"Since 1936," the other Jew answered. That trumped Chaim's claim. It also meant the fellow had been here through the purges back home. Maybe that had saved him. Then again, who could say? Some of the Russians had gone back to almost certain arrest-but they'd gone. Soviet discipline, in its own way, was as formidable as the Prussian variety. The Jew went on, "I have fought here, and in the south, and on the Ebro, and now here again."

"And what do you think of it all?" Chaim asked.

"We are still fighting," the other man replied. He raised his glass. "Let us keep fighting!" He said it in Yiddish, and then in his strange Spanish. Everybody drank. ONE OF THE SS MEN who'd come to grab Wolfgang Storch had taken an ugly leg wound. He was in a military hospital somewhere well behind the line. When he got out, he'd be able to wear a wound badge that would make him the envy of his deskbound friends. Willi Dernen wondered how much he'd care. Sometimes you paid more for things than they were really worth.

The one who was left was named Waldemar Zober. He thought Willi had something to do with Wolfgang's disappearance. He thought so, yes, but he couldn't prove a goddamn thing as long as Willi played dumb.

And Willi did. His old man had called him a goddamn dummy plenty of times. Back in the day, that had pissed Willi off. Now, for the first time, in came in handy. "No, I don't know what happened to him," he told Zober. "For all I know, he took a direct hit, and there wasn't enough of him left to bury. The Frenchies got kind of busy that day, you know."

Zober had the grace to look away. He knew how busy the French had been, all right. But he still suspected Willi. "You went running off to the trenches. Storch was already up there." It made perfect sense to the SS man. Well it might have, too. He only had to connect the dots.

But he didn't know for sure he had connected them. Willi had no intention of telling him. "I ran to the trenches to shoot at the enemy in case he followed up the shelling with an attack. That's what I get paid for, you know-and I don't get paid real well, either."

Waldemar Zober not only had rank-he had those SS runes on his collar tab. They made him Heinrich Himmler's fair-haired boy. They also meant he got more money than a Wehrmacht soldier of equivalent rank would have. And, most of the time, he never came unpleasantly close to shells or bullets. Life wasn't fair-not even close.

His lips were uncommonly red. He pushed out the lower one now, like a four-year-old about to throw a tantrum. You could spank a spoiled little brat. Nobody could wallop an SS man, no matter how much he deserved it.

"Interfering with an SS investigation is a crime with severe punishment attached," he growled.

"Der Herr Jesus!" Willi burst out. "I've been at the front ever since the fight in the West started. The Frenchies could blow my foot off any old time, same as they did with your buddy. They could blow my balls off, for Christ's sake! And you're going on about severe punishment? Give it a rest, why don't you?"

Zober's eyes might have been cut from blue and white glass, like the ones on an expensive mannequin. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said, and absolute assurance filled his voice. "You don't have the faintest idea. A week in our hands, and you'd beg to fight at the front, even in a punishment company."

Willi licked his lips. He knew about those. Officers and men who'd disgraced themselves by running away or otherwise fucking up got handed rifles and thrown in where the fighting was hottest. If they tried to run again, they got shot from behind. If they lived, they redeemed themselves… or maybe they just won the chance to put out another fire by smothering it with their bodies.

You're a tough guy when you're working over poor bastards who can't hit back, Willi thought. How long would you last up here, though? Not long, I bet. If the bad guys didn't get you, somebody on your own side would arrange an "accident." No one talked about that kind of thing, which didn't mean it didn't happen every once in a while.

You couldn't show thoughts like that, not unless you wanted to find out what camps were like from the inside out. Even if his father had called him a dummy, Willi wasn't that stupid. Wearily, he said, "Look, give it a rest, why don't you? I don't know what happened to Wolfgang, and I wish I did. We were friends. I miss him."

By the glint in Zober's glassy orbs, that was almost a ticket to Dachau all by itself. "He was a criminal. He was an enemy of the Reich, and of the Fuhrer."

"He fucking shot enemies of the Reich," Willi answered. "He was a damn good soldier, and one of the best scroungers I've ever known. I'm still here answering your questions on account of him. The only good thing I can say about what happened to him is, he never knew what got him. I should be so lucky."

"If he did not desert to the enemy," Zober said implacably.

Willi stood up. "I know you're in the SS, sir. But if you say that to the soldiers who know Wolfgang, somebody's gonna punch you in the snoot." He walked out without waiting for leave from the blackshirt.

The funny thing was, he was dead right. Yes, Wolfgang had deserted. As far as Willi knew, though, he was the only guy on this side of the line who knew it. Anybody who didn't know wouldn't believe it. And anybody who heard it from a prick like Waldemar Zober would want to flatten his nose for him.

Only one thing was wrong with walking out on Zober: it didn't get Willi away from his problem. Arno Baatz was also convinced he had something to do with Wolfgang's going missing. Willi couldn't make Awful Arno feel inferior for not being a Landser. Baatz was one-maybe not a good soldier, but a soldier even so.

"You two clowns were asshole buddies," the corporal said. "Don't waste my time telling me you weren't, 'cause I know better. When the SS men told you they were looking for him, what would you do but squeal like a little pink piggy?"

"I didn't do anything like that, goddammit." Willi had told the same lie so many times by now, he was starting to believe it himself. He could feel himself getting angry, which was pretty funny when you thought about it. The anger might be ersatz, but it felt the same as the real thing. "All I did was go to the front line when the shelling started." He looked Awful Arno up and down. "I didn't see you there."

"Well, I was," Baatz said, which might have been true and might have been as big a whopper as any of the ones Willi had come out with. The noncom went on, "And sooner or later you'll tell me one I believe."

"Let's go talk to Captain Lammers," Willi said. "Either he'll jug me or he'll tell you to leave me the fuck alone. Either way, I'll be better off than I am listening to your bullshit all the time."

Baatz blinked. His eyes were dark, and reminded Willi of a mean dog's. Sometimes you could make a mean dog turn tail if you yelled at it and moved towards it instead of running. Sometimes you'd get bitten, though. Willi waited to see what would happen here. "You… want to talk to the captain?" Awful Arno said slowly.

"Bet your ass I do. If it'd get you and that blackshirt out of my hair, I'd talk to the general commanding the division." Willi wondered if he really meant that. Officers with fancy shoulder straps needed to listen to privates' troubles the way they needed getting their headquarters bombed.

But Arno Baatz was also imagining coming face-to-face with a general. By the look plastered across his ugly mug, he wasn't liking it much. He tried to hide that by jeering: "You think the division CO has time for piss-ants like you? Don't make me laugh!"

"The captain will," Willi said. "Let's go find him."

And Captain Lammers would. Awful Arno knew that as well as Willi did. He said something about Willi's mother. Had Willi popped him, they would have visited the captain on the corporal's terms. Willi just stood there. Baatz glowered as fearsomely as he knew how. Willi didn't blink "I've got my eye on you, Dernen," Awful Arno snarled, and he stomped away.

Five minutes later, Willi heard him screaming at some other private for having a dirty rifle. Willi smiled. If you beat up a little kid, he'd turn around and pound on some kid who was smaller yet to make himself feel better. Arno Baatz worked the same way.

Waldemar Zober summoned him one more time. "You'd better watch yourself, Dernen," the blackshirt said. If he'd worn a mustache, he would have twirled it like a villain in an old-time melodrama. "We've got our eye on you."

"Yes, sir," Willi said, in lieu of We? You and your tapeworm? But right after that, Zober went off to inflict himself on some other Wehrmacht men who were just doing their damnedest to win the war for their country.

Arno Baatz kept assigning Willi latrine duty and the other nastiest fatigues he could find. Then the gods of army luck reached down and tapped Willi on the shoulder. A promotion came through. All of a sudden, he found himself a Gefreiter, the lowest of the several grades between private and corporal. He got to wear a pip on his sleeve-not on his shoulder straps, but even so… And, as the rank's name implied, he was freed from the fatigue duties ordinary privates got stuck with. Baatz fumed, but he couldn't do anything about it.

One of these days, you son of a bitch, I'll rank you, Willi thought-a new idea, but a mighty tasty one. See how you like it then. Yeah-just see. SERGEANT DEMANGE LOOKED DETERMINED and disgusted at the same time. "We are going to drive the Germans back," he declared. "That's what the officers say, and so that's what we're going to do." He spat out the microscopic butt of his latest Gitane, ground it into the grass under his bootheel, and lit another one.

The soldiers in his section listened: some eagerly, some impassively, some apprehensively. Luc Harcourt counted himself in the last group. He'd seen too much of the Boches, in defense and in attack. He was anything but thrilled about giving the blond boys in field-gray another chance to ventilate him. He knew Sergeant Demange felt exactly the same way. He also knew that did both of them exactly no good.

"What if the Germans are winding up to take a punch at us?" a soldier asked. The question was very much on Luc's mind, too, but he didn't come out of it. You couldn't ask such things so easily when you were a corporal. Luc didn't much like the responsibility that came with his small rank, but he accepted it.

Sergeant Demange folded both hands into fists and smacked them into each other. "That's what happens then, Louis," he answered. "But the brass doesn't think it'll go like that. They say the Germans have been shipping tanks and shit out of here. They aren't loading up for a punch of their own."

Louis had seen enough to realize the brass didn't know everything there was to know. "What if they're wrong, Sergeant?"

"Well, in that case, we get our nuts crunched. What else?" Demange said. "It happened often enough the last time around. A breakthrough? Of course the next offensive would give us one. Of fucking course. They haven't got a whole hell of a lot smarter since, have they?"

"What can we do, then?" Louis asked-a damn good question.

"When they tell us to go, we go. That's what we can do," Demange answered flatly. "Do anything else and your own side will scrag you. Matter of fact, for you I'll take care of it personally." He paused, his ferret face even fiercer than usual. "Any other stupid questions?"

No one said anything. Louis'd asked the one thing that really needed asking. Only as the knot of soldiers broke up did Luc say, "How hard are we gonna get fucked, Sergeant?"

Demange looked at him. "They won't kiss us-I'll tell you that. If they really have shipped out their tanks… Well, shit, what if they have? They'll know which way we're coming, and they'll have an antitank gun with every one of our tanks' names on it. But what can you do?"

Once you put on a uniform-once they drafted you and put a uniform on you-you couldn't do a goddamn thing except what they told you. You figured that out in a hurry. If you had trouble, if you were slow or stubborn, they rubbed your nose in it. Luc understood what was what, all right. "Ah, shit," he said.

"See? You're not so fucking dumb." Demange reached up and thumped him on the shoulder. Luc had to hold himself tight to keep from jumping. Even such rough affection from Demange was far, far out of the ordinary.

French tanks clanked up under cover of darkness. The people with fancy kepis were serious about this, anyway. How much that meant… The only way to find out was to see how many poilus turned into cat's-meat and how much ground they took doing it.

Dawn came early these days. Summer would be here soon. Luc hoped he would be here, too, so he could see it when it came. He waited for the balloon to go up, his mouth papery dry. He knew about all the barbed wire ahead. You could get hung up on the stuff, stuck like a fly on flypaper, waiting for machine-gun bullets to chew you up and leave you limp. How many French soldiers had died that way in the last war? How many more were about to? Am I one of them? That was the question you never wanted to ask yourself.

Behind him, the French artillery woke up early. 75s, 105s, 155s… They pounded away for all they were worth. The ground shook under his feet. He glanced back over his shoulder. All those muzzle flashes made it look as if the sun were rising in the west.

The Germans were good, damn them. It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes after hell started coming down on their positions when their artillery started hitting the French forward trenches. Luc huddled there, trying to make himself as small as he could. Before long, he'd have to come out of the trench. He'd feel like an escargot without its shell. And the Boches had such sharp escargot forks!

An officer's whistle shrilled. The sound seemed small and lost in the middle of the thunderous artillery duel. Sergeant Demange let out a yell that cut through the explosions like a sharp knife through soft cheese: "Come on, you old cons! This is what you punched your time cards for!"

Luc would never have volunteered for this-which mattered not a sou's worth. He scrambled up the dirt steps that led out of the trench. His pack weighed him down, even stripped to the minimum as it was. It seemed heavy as an escargot's shell. But it didn't give him even that much protection.

As he went forward at a lumbering trot, he called fancy curses down on Denis Boucher's head. Maybe the little bastard was screwing his half-faithful Marie right now. Maybe the military police had caught him. Even that would be better than this. Anything would be better than this.

Clang-whang! That factory noise was an antitank round bouncing off a tank's armored carapace. If somebody inside the machine wasn't working his rosary beads, he was wasting a hell of a chance. Yes, the Germans were alert. When weren't they, damn them?

Clang! Blam! That factory noise was an antitank round penetrating a tank's steel hide and all the ammo inside going off at once. The turret blew three meters into the air and squashed a foot soldier when it came down. He didn't have time to scream. He probably didn't even have time to be surprised.

Machine guns rattled like malignant jackdaws. "Come on! Keep going!" Sergeant Demange shouted. "They aren't aimed at you!"

One of the things Luc had found out was that they didn't have to be aimed at you. They put out so many bullets, they could kill you any which way. But he couldn't flop down and start digging himself a foxhole, not when he had to mind a squad. He yelled "Keep going!" too. Once they smashed through the German line, things would-well, might-get easier.

Tanks really did mash down barbed wire, no matter how thickly the Germans laid it. And, if you went in right behind them, they shielded you from the fire directly ahead. Watching ricochets spark off the tank in front of him made Luc wonder how many of them would have nailed him if the tank weren't there. So what if its exhaust made him want to put on his gas mask? He might have been a Roman legionary advancing behind a big, fat shield.

This shield had weapons of its own. It stopped. So did Luc. Its cannon roared-once, twice. One of the machine guns that had been filling the air with death suddenly shut up. Even some of the new conscripts huddled behind the tank with Luc shouted happily. They knew every machine-gun nest that got ruined made them likelier to live.

The tank lurched forward-for about another fifteen meters. Then it hit a mine. That blew off its left track. It stopped. Hatches popped open. The crew jumped out. A tank that couldn't move was a tank an antitank gun would murder any minute now. The tank men carried only pistols. That made them useless in an infantry fight. Luc didn't know what they'd do now.

He didn't have time to worry about it, either. They were coming up on the Germans' foxholes and trenches. A Boche popped up with his hands high. "Kamerad!" he shouted hopefully.

Luc gestured with his rifle. The German climbed out of his hole, babbling thanks for not getting killed on the spot. Luc gestured again. The Boche stumbled back toward Beauvais. If he was lucky, no Frenchman would plug him before he got there. If he wasn't… Well, too bad, old man.

"Fuck me if I don't think we can do this after all!" Sergeant Demange yelled. Luc was starting to think the same thing. He hadn't seen any German tanks yet, and his own side still had plenty running. He tramped on toward the east. "LET'S HAVE ONE MORE RADIO CHECK, Theo," Heinz Naumann said.

"Right, Sergeant," Theo Hossbach answered resignedly. The radio set had worked perfectly half an hour earlier. They hadn't moved since. What could have gone wrong? But Naumann had the prejump jitters. Nothing to do but humor him. Theo hooked in with the company, regimental, and divisional networks. The set still worked fine. "Alles gut," he reported.

"Danke," Naumann said. "Won't be long now."

Theo didn't answer. The radioman's position in a Panzer II left him in a zone of no time and no place. He sat behind the turret and in front of the engine compartment. He couldn't see out unless he opened the hatch in the rear decking and stuck his head through it to look around. You didn't want to do that unless all your other choices were worse: cooking like a pork roast inside a burning panzer, for instance. No time and no place would do.

In an odd way, they even suited Theo. Some people who knew him called him self-sufficient. Rather more called him dreamy. All he knew was, most of the time the world within his head was more interesting than anything that went on outside. Being stuck in the bowels of all this complicated ironmongery bothered him much less than it would have troubled most other people.

Sometimes you couldn't ignore the outside world no matter how hard you tried. When hundreds of guns opened up behind you and thousands of shells crashed down in front of you, the world beyond the panzer's armored skin made you notice it. And the company commander bawled "Forward!" into his earphones.

"Forward!" Theo told Naumann.

"Forward!" The panzer commander passed the word to Adalbert Stoss.

"Forward!" The driver put the panzer in gear. The Polish plain could hardly have made better panzer country. The terrain was so smooth, they might almost have been rolling across a manicured practice ground. The only difference was, the Red Army wouldn't have been waiting at the edge of a practice ground.

Theo wondered how big that difference would turn out to be. All winter long, the Red Army had had a devil of a time beating the Poles. The Poles were brave-Theo had seen that in the couple of weeks since the panzer division traveled halfway across Europe. But the gear the Poles had…

He shook his head. Their army might have done all right in the last war. They had rifles and machine guns and field artillery. They also had cavalry regiments that went into battle with lances, as if the twentieth century-to say nothing of the nineteenth-had never happened. Their tanks were rusty French relics, and they didn't own very many. Panzer IIs could have run rings around them and shot them up with ease, and Theo knew the shortcomings of his own mechanical mount all too well.

Bang! Somebody might have smacked the panzer turret with a hammer. Or, much more likely, somebody might have taken a shot at Heinz Naumann, who, like any good panzer commander, rode head and shoulders out of the turret whenever he could. Theo didn't need to see out. Heinz damn well did.

He didn't need to get killed, though. When people started trying to blow your head off, you ducked back inside and used the vision ports. They didn't show much, but they were a hell of a lot better than getting shot. And, no sooner than Naumann had pulled himself inside his case-hardened steel cocoon, several more bullets spanged off the turret and the right side of the panzer.

"Halt!" he ordered, and Adi Stoss did. Heinz traversed the turret to the right. Then he stopped working the traversing gear and said "Forward!" again.

"What's up?" Stoss asked.

"Somebody else took out the foxhole before I could," Naumann answered. "Those Russians won't bother anybody from now on."

"Sounds good." The driver goosed the panzer again. They rattled on. In his mind, Theo pictured a map. Poland had a horn in the far northeast that separated the USSR from Lithuania. It had separated Russia from Lithuania, anyhow; with the Red Army in Wilno, the Soviets were going to border the little Baltic state. The Lithuanians were both furious because they wanted Wilno themselves (they called it Vilnius) and scared shitless because the Soviet Union was a thousand times their size. Now that Germany was jumping in with both feet, Lithuania might join the fight against Stalin. And if she did, Germany and Russia might notice.

Then Heinz said "Halt!" again. A moment later, he added, "Russian panzer!" He slewed the turret to the left for all he was worth.

Not being able to see out didn't usually bother Theo. At times like this, though… How fast was the enemy panzer's turret traversing? The sweat that dripped from his armpits had nothing to do with how hot it was inside the Panzer II. Fear made it foul and rank. Would a red-hot cannon round tear through the flimsy armor around him and set everything in here on fire? Or would it ricochet around inside and tear up the whole crew? All kinds of nice things to think about, and he couldn't do anything about any of them.

For that matter, how well could Heinz shoot? They'd all find out right about… now. The turret stopped traversing. Theo could see Naumann's left hand stab at the trigger on the elevating handwheel. The 20mm cannon barked-once, twice, three times. Heinz waited, then fired once more.

"You got him! He's burning!" Adi said excitedly.

"Ja," Heinz agreed. The coaxial machine gun's trigger was on the traverse handwheel, to his right. He squeezed off a couple of short bursts from the MG34, then grunted in satisfaction. "All right-we don't have to worry about the crew any more. Forward again, Adi."

"Forward," Stoss echoed. "Jawohl!" He hadn't sounded so respectful before Heinz killed his first enemy panzer. Theo could understand that. He was breathing easier, too.

Naumann squeezed off several more bursts from the machine gun. He didn't tell Adi to stop, or even to slow down. "Don't know if I got the damn Russians or not, but I sure as hell did make 'em duck," he said.

And that might be good enough. Foot soldiers who couldn't shoot back might as well not be there. And the German and Polish infantry advancing with and behind the panzers would soon make sure the Ivans weren't there any more. The Red Army might have seized Poland's northeastern horn, but it was about to get taken in the flank and cut off from its homeland. How would the Reds like that?

Not very much, Theo suspected. What could they do about it, though? How good were they, really? Before long, the Wehrmacht would find out.

A machine-gun burst rattled off the panzer's flank. Pebbles on a tin roof, the bullets might have been. They might have, but they weren't.

Huge blasts from somewhere up ahead made all the racket that had gone before them seem small. "Stukas, I hope," Theo said to Heinz.

"You'd better believe it," the panzer commander answered. "A whole bunch of Russians just went up in smoke… Didn't get the panzers, though, dammit."

Theo didn't see how you could expect to wreck a panzer from the air. Only a direct hit would knock one out, and what were the odds of that?

When they stopped for the evening, Heinz said they'd come better than twenty kilometers. Theo believed it, though they might have been going round in circles for all he could prove. One stretch of Polish plain looked like another. That burnt-out Russian panzer hadn't been anywhere close by, though. Theo examined the hulk curiously.

The more he looked, the more formidable it seemed. It was almost the size of a Panzer III, and had a bigger gun than the III's 37mm. Instead of going straight up and down, the armor sloped to help deflect enemy fire. Theo glanced over at Heinz Naumann, who was also eyeing the Russian machine. "Did you kill one of these?"

"Uh-huh." Heinz sounded unwontedly thoughtful. "I wouldn't want to stop a round from that gun. What d'you think? Forty-five millimeters? Fifty?"

"Forty-five, I'd guess," Theo said.

"Smash through our plate like it was tinfoil either way," Heinz said. "Next question is, how many of these fuckers have the Ivans got?"

"Well," Theo answered, "we'll find out."