“Well, Leonid Abramovich, if the Americans do it to us, we don’t have much choice but to do it to them, do we?” Gribkov said.
“Of course not, Comrade Pilot, not when you put it that way,” Tsederbaum replied. “But if they keep hitting us and we keep hitting back, will anyone or anything be left by the time we get through?”
That was a better question than Boris wished it were. After a moment, he said, “We don’t have to worry about such things. Our superiors tell us what to do, and we do it.”
“Of course, Comrade Pilot,” the Jew said. Four innocuous words, and he sounded as if he was calling Gribkov a liar.
On droned the Li-2. The United States designed excellent airplanes. The Soviet Union made excellent copies of them. The United States had designed the first atom bombs. The ones the USSR made worked just as well, as Gribkov had seen. Whether their design also copied American originals, he didn’t know, but he wouldn’t have been surprised.
The plane passed over Leningrad on the way to the new base. Patchy clouds there didn’t let Gribkov see as much of the USSR’s second city (Kiev would have thought of it as the third; it thought of itself as the first) as he would have liked, but he did see that its cityscape also had chunks bitten out.
So did his comrades. “The Americans called here, too,” Vladimir Zorin said glumly.
“Did you think that they hadn’t?” Tsederbaum asked.
“No. But I wished they wouldn’t,” Zorin said. “This was a hero city above all hero cities in the last war. The Nazis laid siege to it for three years, but couldn’t take it. Now the Americans killed who knows how many people in the blink of an eye.”
However many the atom bombs had killed, it was probably fewer than had died during the siege. Those people mostly hadn’t died in the blink of an eye, though. Most of them had starved to death, especially in the first winter. The bread ration in Leningrad got down to something like a hundred grams a day, and even that tiny bit was stretched with sawdust or sometimes dirt. People whispered of cannibals-well-fed, rosy-cheeked cannibals-roaming the streets in search of corpses or living men and women they could make into corpses…and meat.
But that wasn’t what bothered Boris Gribkov. “We knew their bombers were coming!” he said. “We knew, dammit. We should have done a better job of stopping them. The way it looks, we couldn’t even slow them down.”
“They couldn’t stop us, either, Comrade Pilot,” Tsederbaum reminded him. “If they’d been able to, we wouldn’t be sitting here now talking about how bad our own air defenses were.”
He was right. Gribkov hadn’t looked at it that way. Now that he had to, he said, “Yes…and no. We were hitting their coast, so they wouldn’t have had much warning-”
“Maybe not for Seattle,” the navigator broke in. “But they should have been waiting for us at every city south of that. They should have been-only they weren’t.”
“They were dickheads,” Boris said. “Just because they were dickheads, should we have been dickheads, too? We had radar! We had jet fighters! To hit places like Moscow and Kiev, the Americans had to fly over our territory for hundreds of kilometers. They got through.”
“They lost planes.” Tsederbaum sounded uncomfortable.
“So did we. Not enough, either way, to keep the cities safe,” Boris said. No one said anything in response to that. His crewmates had to be remembering, as he was, the holes burnt into the hearts of the great Russian cities, and all the people who’d lived in those places and lived no more.
The Li-2 flew under the clouds toward the camouflaged airstrip. Gribkov had spoken of jet fighters. Now two of them streaked past the transport’s windows. He knew a moment of alarm. Leningrad had always been Russia’s window on the West. It might not be impossibly far for American fighters with drop tanks to reach.
But no. Those were MiG-15s, familiar as the back of his own hand. Their tails and fuselages and swept wings were blazoned with the rodina’s red star. Their jet engines weren’t copies of an American design. They were copies of a British design, and far better than the copies of Nazi jet engines the Soviet Union had used before.
Bump! The Li-2 touched down on the dirt runway and taxied to a stop. One of the gunners opened the door on the right side of the passenger compartment. Cool, moist air came in. So did the noise of the props, which were still spinning. The blast of air from them almost knocked Gribkov off his feet when he jumped out. As soon as the whole bomber crew had left the Li-2, the pilot taxied toward the men who waited with maskirovka off to the side of the airstrip.
What looked like a big farmhouse was the only building in sight. Boris and his crewmates walked over to it. When he opened the door, a Red Air Force major greeted them all. Inside, the place looked like an air base. A radioman with earphones and a mike tended to his set. A sergeant flicked beads on an abacus as he did paperwork. A battered samovar sat over a low flame on a table in a corner. Tobacco smoke fogged the air.
“Well, we’re home,” Leonid Tsederbaum said. Gribkov felt the same way.
16
More and more Germans flooded into the emergency militia. Konrad Adenauer still wasn’t calling it an army, but it sure looked like one to Gustav Hozzel. He, of course, was on the inside looking out. However much it looked like an army, it didn’t look like the old Wehrmacht. The men wore American olive drab, not Feldgrau. They wore U.S. rank badges on their sleeves, not German ones on shoulder straps. They still wore those U.S. helmets, too. Gustav did miss his old Stahlhelm, but not enough to risk getting caught by the Russians with one on his head. And they used American weapons, with a few British Sten guns and mortars mixed in.
No matter what they looked like, most of them behaved as if the last war had ended week before last-or maybe as if it hadn’t ended at all. Some of the volunteers were kids who’d been too young to take on the Ivans before…although boys of twelve and thirteen had fought in Berlin. A far larger number were old Frontschweine, ready for another go at the Bolsheviks.
The Germans didn’t enjoy the good, hard physical shape they’d had six or eight years before. A stretch of peacetime would do that to you. But they made up for it by knowing every trick in the book. Anybody the Russians hadn’t been able to kill was good at his trade almost by definition.
Some of them fought with a reckless disregard for life and limb that startled even Gustav. “Rolf, what unit were you in the last time around?” he asked a fellow in his company after the man charged a Russian machine-gun nest. He made the Ivans keep their heads down with his Sten, then finished them off with grenades.
Rolf’s cheeks hollowed as he took a drag on a cigarette. After blowing out a stream of smoke, he answered, “LAH. How come?”
“Oh,” Gustav said. The Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was part of the Waffen-SS, not the Wehrmacht. It had started out as the Führer’s personal bodyguard unit, and ended up as one of the best German panzer divisions. But the Waffen-SS combat style was more aggressive than the one the Wehrmacht favored. (So was the SS taste for atrocities, though the Wehrmacht wasn’t a dewy pink innocent there, either.) After a moment, Gustav did ask, “Have you got a blood-group tattoo?”
“Not any more. Had it cut out years ago. Hurt like a bitch when I did, but the scar hardly shows now,” Rolf said.
“All right.” Gustav left it there. The Russians slaughtered the men with those tattoos they caught, the same way they bumped off soldiers with German helmets. To them, both were marks of Nazism.