Horrible things would have happened to all the men in the earlier crew. Morozov didn’t need to dwell on them, either. If you started wondering whether your tank was unlucky…If you did, you were liable to bring down the curse you were trying to avoid.
“Why don’t you get them, then?” the corporal said. “The beast has a full tank, and we bombed it up. You can go straight to regimental headquarters and see what they need you to do.”
“I serve the Soviet Union! Don’t go away. I’ll be back with them in a few minutes.” He trotted to the far edge of the tank park. Mechanics and welders worked on damaged T-54s and Stalins-and on a few damaged T-35/85s, leftovers from the last war pressed into service again. A cursing crew used a crane to drop a new engine into a T-54. The number on the side of the turret was different, or Konstantin would have wondered if that was his old machine.
“Well?” Pavel Gryzlov asked when Konstantin came up to the crew.
“Well, it’s a T-54,” the tank commander reported.
“That’s good,” the gunner said. “When I saw some of the old models here, I was afraid they’d try to palm one of those clapped-out cunts off on us. Fat chance we’d have in a T-34 against a Pershing or a Centurion!”
“We didn’t do so well in our T-54,” Mogamed Safarli put in between puffs on a pipe.
“We hurt them before they hit us,” Konstantin reminded the loader. “Anyway, this isn’t a brand new machine, but I think it’s sound.” Well, except for that patch on the frontal armor, anyway. “It’s got a full load of ammo and a full tank of fuel. We just have to put it back into action.”
“Let’s do that, then! We serve the Soviet Union!” Yevgeny Ushakov’s voice cracked with excitement. For the veterans, I serve the Soviet Union! was a catchphrase with no more meaning than Yes, sir! or I’ll take care of it. Ushakov, still wet behind the ears, said it as if he meant it.
Well, he’d find out. Or maybe he was playing a role, and what seemed like excitement and enthusiasm and patriotism was in fact acting ability. You never could tell to whom people really reported.
“Come on over, then,” Morozov said. “Climb in and fire it up. We’ll find out what the regiment wants us to do, and hop back on the merry-go-around again. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“Da, Comrade Sergeant!” By the way Ushakov said it, he did think it sounded like fun. Gryzlov and Morozov eyed each other for a moment. Yes, the kid would find out. He’d never had to flee a burning tank. He’d never watched a crewmate suffer and bleed. He’d never watched enemy soldiers machine-gunned from the turret, or seen an enemy tank afire and known it could as easily have been his own.
Safarli’s nostrils twitched when he got into the tank. “Smells like the lamps at my grandfather’s house,” he said.
Pavel Gryzlov glanced at Morozov again. The loader must not have known why the fighting compartment smelled that way. As plainly, Gryzlov did. “Well, there are worse odors,” he said. He didn’t name any of them. In this business, you didn’t keep your innocence long. If Safarli and Ushakov had some left, more power to them.
“Start it up,” Morozov called to the driver.
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Ushakov replied, as Konstantin had guessed he would. The engine belched to life. It ran more raggedly than the one in Morozov’s old machine, but it did run. The new driver shifted well enough. Morozov guided him toward regimental HQ. As they rumbled along, Konstantin watched Gryzlov fiddle with the sights on the main armament and the coaxial machine gun. He couldn’t do as much as he doubtless wanted to without some leisure, but he was doing whatever he could.
As it happened, Captain Gurevich was back at regimental headquarters, seeing to something or other, when the T-54 chugged in. Morozov waved to him from the cupola. He didn’t ride buttoned up unless he had to. “You’ve got a runner again, do you, Sergeant?” Gurevich called.
“Sure do, Comrade Captain,” Konstantin answered. “Where do I go with it?”
“We’re still trying to break into Arnsberg, four or five kilometers up the road there,” the company commander said. “They’ll be glad to see another 100mm gun. Why don’t you give them a hand?”
Morozov sketched a salute. “I’ll do it, Comrade Captain,” he said, and ducked inside to deliver the word to the men who couldn’t have heard it. The tank headed for Arnsberg. Morozov’s belly knotted. Another chance to serve the rodina. And another chance to get horribly killed.
–
Bill Staley cherished the postcard as he’d never cherished any piece of writing before. The house is a wreck, but Linda and I are OK, it said. At the refugee camp, sleeping in the car. Will get out when we have somewhere to go. Much love, Marian. Not a long message, but more precious than rubies to him.
The night after he got the card, he slept well for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long. He found himself too much reminded of O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Bad dreams he had. They woke him, again and again, in one kind of a cold sweat or another. Sometimes his wife and little girl went up in radioactive fire. Sometimes he did himself-till he woke with thundering heart. Sometimes all the Chinese and Russians he’d helped incinerate rose from the graves they mostly didn’t have, hungry for revenge.
How many people had died from the bombs his B-29 dropped? He couldn’t begin to guess. When he was awake, he didn’t try. Indeed, he did his best not to think of what he did on his missions. When he couldn’t help calling it to mind, he told himself he did it strictly in the line of duty-and shoved it out of his thoughts as fast as he could.
All of which worked fairly well…while he was awake. But the more he shoved things aside by day, the more they came out at night. He’d woken up screaming only once. The cold sweats bothered no one but himself. That didn’t make them-and the nightmares that spawned them-any less horrible to him.
Once, over frosty-cold Falstaffs at the officers’ club, he asked Hank McCutcheon, “Sir, do you ever, um, dream about any of the things we’ve done?”
“Dream?” The pilot paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. “Oh, maybe once or twice. Nothing too much. Nothing too bad. How about you?”
“A little more than that,” Bill said, which was true in the same sense that water was moist or a jet of molten metal was warm.
“Ah.” For all they showed, Major McCutcheon’s eyes might have been made from green and white glass. “Still able to handle your job okay when you aren’t sleeping?”
“Oh, hell, yes,” Bill answered quickly. That was true, too. True or not, though, it wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.
Regardless of whether he wanted to talk about other things, Hank McCutcheon plainly didn’t. “That’s good, Billy-boy,” McCutcheon said. “That’s what you need. Can’t let the hobgoblins and fantods get you down, right?”
“Sure,” Bill said tonelessly, and emptied his own beer. He’d been drinking more than usual lately, in the hope that it would dull or blot out the nightmares. It hadn’t, but he hadn’t cut back again, either.
“There you go. You’re a good man, Bill. Nothing to worry about, not in the long run, hey?” Without waiting for an answer, McCutcheon stood up, patted Staley on the shoulder, and walked out of the club: back straight, stride long, the image of a professional military man on the move.
Fuck. Bill silently mouthed the word. He wasn’t a professional military man himself, and didn’t want to be. Maybe that made the difference.