More people still had fled the city. The kolkhozniks had herded refugees away. Some of the injuries those poor bastards sported were ordinary, the kind Ihor had seen over and over in the last war. The burns, though…He hadn’t seen anything like that before, except a couple of luckless men who wound up on the wrong end of a flamethrower. But these didn’t seem to want to heal. Raw, oozing meat…
With an effort of will, he pulled his mind away from all that. “So what do we do?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” his wife said. “We won’t have to worry about it till fall. By then, I’m sure somebody will have come around to give us orders.”
“I suppose so,” Ihor said around a yawn. All the same, he found time to wonder some more before sleep dragged him down. The people who gave orders like that would have come from Kiev before the Americans lashed it with fire. If they didn’t come from Kiev, wouldn’t they come from Moscow? When you got right down to it, in the end everything came from Moscow.
If it could. The Americans had desecrated Moscow along with Kiev. They hadn’t killed Comrade Stalin; he still spoke on Radio Moscow. But Ihor had no way of knowing whether Radio Moscow still came from its namesake city, or from somewhere like Magnitogorsk or Irkutsk. He did know Yuri Levitan and the other regular broadcasters weren’t reading the news on the radio any more. He couldn’t prove that meant anything, but it probably did.
The people who were reading the news on the radio warned against going into the ruins of cities struck by atomic bombs. The warning was twofold. The authorities declared looting a crime punishable by summary execution-a bullet in the back of the neck. And they warned of poisonous radioactivity lingering in the air and water and on the ground.
Maybe the radio told the truth. Maybe it served up a fresh helping of government lies. Ihor didn’t try to find out himself. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t looted in Soviet, Polish, and German cities retaken from the Nazis. When you were in the Red Army, you were supposed to be your own quartermaster sergeant. Anything over and above keeping yourself fed was a bonus.
But plundering Kiev felt different to him. He couldn’t have said why, but it did. Not everybody on the kolkhoz thought the way he did. People pedaled off, saying they wanted to see what the ruins looked like. If they came back with more than they had when they set out, how could you prove it?
Then again, sometimes they didn’t come back. A kolkhoznik named Orest Makhno rode away to see what he could see. That was the last anyone at the collective farm saw of him. He might have come across an enormous cache of goldpieces stamped with the shaggy visage of one Tsar or another, enough to set himself up as a prince of thieves. If you wanted to look on the bright side of things, that was how they would look to you.
More likely, though, he’d met a stocky, unsmiling man in a bad suit, one who’d heard enough protestations of innocence to laugh at them or ignore them altogether. And, more likely, Orest had found nine millimeters’ worth of answers: as much as he would need for the rest of his life.
–
Cade Curtis cradled his M-1 carbine. They’d congratulated him for making it from the Chosin Reservoir to the UN lines far to the south. They’d asked him how he’d done it, and taken careful notes as he spun his story. Fair enough. Knowing what had worked for him might let them give other soldiers in trouble tips that would really help.
Afterwards, they’d promoted him to first lieutenant. They’d given him a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And they’d given him not just a platoon but a company of his own. Officers were scarce in Korea, officers with combat experience even scarcer.
The war here ground on just the same, even if the wider world, distracted by atoms and mushroom clouds, hardly bothered looking this way any more. Despite the bombs that had fallen on the Manchurian cities, the Red Chinese kept throwing as many troops into the fight as they could. And the North Koreans, though reduced to rifles and submachine guns and homemade grenades, went on fighting, too. They were bastards, but they were brave bastards.
Cade wished he had a Russian-made submachine gun himself. Having lugged one most of the way south, he’d come to like it better than the weapon with which the USA armed its officers. The Russian guns were more reliable than his carbine, more compact, and had a much higher rate of fire. They didn’t jam in cold weather. His piece looked like a rifle. Unfortunately, it didn’t perform like one-or like a submachine gun. It combined the worst of both worlds.
There was a loophole in front of the trench. You could, if you were so inclined, examine the enemy positions up ahead through it without exposing your whole head. Cade Curtis wasn’t so inclined. He figured some sniper with a scope-sighted Russian rifle was watching it. If the son of a bitch saw an eyeball looking back at him, the family of the eyeball’s owner would get a Deeply Regrets wire from the Department of Defense.
So Curtis looked up over another stretch of the entrenchment. He showed more of himself, but only for a couple of seconds. Then he ducked out of sight again. Nothing looked to be stirring. All he saw was snow and dirt and rusting wire. That proved only so much, of course. The Red Chinese and North Koreans had learned plenty about the fine art of camouflage from their Russian instructors. But you did what you could. In this imperfect world, that was all you could do. This imperfect world’s weather worked the same way. The calendar said it was spring, but nobody’d told the countryside.
“All quiet, sir?” Staff Sergeant Lou Klein asked. He was about forty, with graying whiskers and sagging jowls. The Germans hadn’t killed him in North Africa or Italy, though the ribbon for the Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters said they’d tried hard enough. He could have run the company better than Cade, but he’d never bothered going to OCS.
“Looks that way,” Cade said. “I mean, you can’t tell with the Chinks, but I didn’t see anything stirring.”
Klein lit a Camel. “Mind if I look for myself?”
“Be my guest.” If the career noncom thought Cade would get huffy about the question, he had another think coming. Curtis did say, “You may not want to do it right where I did, though.”
“Nope. That wouldn’t be so real great.” If the warning offended Klein, he didn’t show it. He walked along the trench till just before it kinked, popped up to check things, and promptly disappeared from sight. Somebody fired at the place where he’d been, but he wasn’t there any more.
“You reckon we’ll ever see the tanks they keep promising us?” Cade asked him.
“Sir, I been in the Army about as long as you been around, so I gotta say stranger things have happened.” Klein paused to think. “You ask me to name two of ’em, though, I’m gonna have some trouble.”
“That’s how it looks to me, too. I was hoping you would tell me I was wrong,” Curtis said. The Reds hated and feared American armor. They hadn’t had that many old Russian T-34/85s to begin with, and a lot of the ones they had had were wrecks now. Even a new T-34/85 wasn’t a match for a Pershing. And the enemy wasn’t likely to get new ones, or T-54s, not when Stalin needed tanks a hell of a lot closer to home.
Of course, that shoe also fit the American foot in Korea. With the Red Army trying to crash its way to the Rhine, every American, British, and French tank around was busy doing its best to hold the Ivans back. After World War II ended, the French had taken on some ex-Nazi Panthers to tide them over till they built up their own tank factories again. If any of those brutes were still running, the froggies had probably thrown them into the fight, too.
All of which left Korea half forgotten, dangling from the ends of both sides’ ridiculously long supply lines. And it turned the fighting here into something out of the war before last: trenches and artillery and grenades and machine guns. The fighters that sometimes strafed the trenches were more modern than Sopwith Camels. But, with the aviation world swinging at top speed from prop jobs to jets, they were hardly less obsolete than those cloth-and-wood-and-wire biplanes.