Morozov tumbled into a foxhole beside the burnt-out ruins of a shack. A Red Army corporal with one of the new Kalashnikovs grinned at him. “Look what the cat drug in,” he said. “I didn’t know they let you people out of your cages.”
“When the cage starts burning, you go,” Morozov assured him. “Listen, help me bring my driver in, will you? He’s got a wounded leg.”
“I’ll do that,” the infantry noncom said at once. Wounded men were serious business.
He was less leery about leaving his foxhole than Morozov had been of bailing out of the dead T-54. To him, going around in the open was all part of a day’s work. Morozov couldn’t very well hang back himself. They bundled Mikhail Kasyanov into their arms and got him into the hole.
“Let’s see what we have here,” the corporal said, as he used his bayonet to cut Kasyanov’s coveralls so he could examine the injury. “Doesn’t seem too bad.” He began to bandage it with skill that told of experience.
“Aii!” Kasyanov said, and then, “Up yours, you whore! It isn’t your motherfucking leg!”
“That’s a fact,” the corporal agreed placidly. He examined his handiwork. “Not bleeding too much now. You’ll be on the shelf a while, for sure. If the war’s still going when you get better, though, I bet they let you serve again.”
“Happy fucking day,” Kasyanov said. “You have a morphine shot? It hurts like they shot the head of my dick off.”
“Ouch!” The corporal cupped his hands in front of his crotch. Morozov wanted to do the same thing. The foot soldier took a syringe from a pouch on his belt and stuck the tank crewman. He said, “This ought to do the trick. I took it off a dead American. Those whores carry all kinds of goodies. They must all be millionaires over there.”
Someone who wanted to land him in trouble could do it if he kept talking like that. The Soviet Union declared over and over, at the top of its ideological lungs, that the American proletariat, like the proletariat in other capitalist countries, was oppressed by the bourgeoisie and especially by the magnates, the plutocrats. What would an American soldier be but a member of the proletariat, dragooned into service by his vicious overlords?
And yet…During the last war, Morozov had seen for himself that even Poland was richer than the workers’ and peasants’ paradise, and that people lived better there. He’d seen that Germany was much richer than the USSR, though he hadn’t seen any parts of Germany that weren’t knocked flat before he got to them.
During this war, he’d seen that the Western-occupied parts of Germany were richer and were rebuilding faster than the section the USSR controlled. The corporal must have seen some of those things, too. Unlike Morozov, he didn’t know enough to keep his big mouth shut.
So the tank commander without a tank just asked, “Where’s the closest aid station?”
“Back that way, not quite a kilometer,” the corporal said, jerking his thumb to the east. “You want your other two guys to take him? Once they get away from the front, he can probably drape his arms over their shoulders and go on his good leg.”
“How’s that sound, Misha?” Morozov asked.
“Fine by me.” Kasyanov spoke as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Morphine was good stuff, as Morozov had also seen before. The wounded driver let his comrades take him to the sawbones. Morozov went back with them, wondering what the Red Army would do with him next.
14
Back in the black days of October 1941, the Soviet Union had chosen Kuibishev, on the Volga just west of the Urals, as the capital in case the Nazis took Moscow. There’d been a panic and a skedaddle out of Moscow that October, when it looked as if the Hitlerites would do exactly that. These days, people talked about the skedaddle in whispers when they talked about it at all.
Boris Gribkov understood why they whispered, and why they didn’t like to speak at all. That was called a working sense of self-preservation. Underlying the reticence was the question of whether anyone would have paid attention to Stalin had he tried to give orders from a provincial town dusty in the summer and frozen in the winter. The Soviet Union was lucky: it hadn’t had to find out.
But Kuibishev was now what it had been intended to be then: the alternative capital of the USSR. Jackbooted SS men didn’t goose-step through Moscow’s streets. Atomic fire, though, had burnt too many of those streets out of existence. Too many commissars and generals were burnt out of existence, too.
So the authorities hadn’t brought Boris and his bomber crew to Moscow to congratulate them on dealing a similar blow to Seattle. No, they’d pinned Hero of the Soviet Union medals on them here in Kuibishev. They’d photographed them for Pravda and Izvestia and Red Star. And, after that, they hadn’t seemed sure what to do with them next.
“You know what really bothers me?” Leonid Tsederbaum said quietly as he and Gribkov walked from their barracks to the mess hall at the Red Air Force base where they were being kept. Confined, Gribkov judged-and hoped-was too strong a word.
“No. What really bothers you, Leonid Abramovich?” the pilot asked. It wasn’t as if he didn’t also have a list of things that really bothered him. Tsederbaum was a clever Zhid. He might be bothered by some things that hadn’t even occurred to Gribkov.
“What really bothers me,” he said, pausing to light a papiros and blow a stream of smoke up toward the watery sky, “is that, as far as I can tell, we’re the only Tu-4 crew that bombed America they’re making propaganda about.”
“Oh.” Gribkov felt vaguely disappointed. “That crossed my mind, too.” He nodded to himself, admiring the understatement. “Even so, though, considering what we all did, you have to say the rodina got a good return on its investment.”
“How capitalist!” Tsederbaum exclaimed. Boris eyed him. In the USSR, a man could disappear without ditching in the Pacific or having the Americans shoot him down. A Hero of the Soviet Union could become a nobody in nothing flat. But the navigator didn’t look like someone getting ready to report him to the MGB. He just looked like somebody cracking wise. Of course, what somebody looked like didn’t mean a thing.
“Have you heard anything about our next assignment?” Gribkov asked. Being a clever Zhid, Tsederbaum was liable to have connections in all kinds of interesting places.
Just because he was liable to didn’t mean he did. He shook his head. “Not a word. Since you’re the pilot, I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Sorry,” Gribkov said. “I serve the Soviet Union, but they haven’t told me how they want me to serve it next.”
He wondered how much Soviet Union would be left to serve by the time the war ended. The Red Army was still advancing in Germany, at least if you believed Radio Moscow. Here, Gribkov did. He knew the signs a newsreader used when he was hedging-or, for that matter, when he was just lying. He hadn’t noticed any of those in the reports.
Even if the advance stopped, even if the Americans and their Western European lackeys somehow turned the tide and fought their way through Russia’s allies in Eastern Europe and invaded the USSR, they wouldn’t be able to conquer and occupy it. Boris was sure of that. If Hitler hadn’t been able to, nobody could.
Which might not have anything to do with anything. He knew what the bomb his Tu-4 had dropped did to Seattle. How many of those bombs had fallen on the Soviet Union? How many holes did you need to blow in the fabric of a country before it was more holes than fabric? Boris Gribkov didn’t know, but he did know the experiment was going on right this minute, both here and in America.