“Uh-huh.” Isztvan nodded miserably.
“Way to go,” the noncom said. “Take care of it for me, too, if I get all ripped up like that.”
“Once was bad enough, and he was a stranger,” Szolovits said.
“You’d do it for a stranger but not for somebody you know? Lofasz a seggedbe!” The Magyar curse meant A horse’s cock up your ass! Hungarians had come into Europe off the steppe, and their language still showed it a thousand years later.
“Are you volunteering, Sergeant?” Isztvan asked. As soon as he spoke, he realized the joke might be too strong. But he was still feeling the horror of what he’d just done, and wanted to exorcise it any way he could. He’d also begun to suspect-though he wasn’t sure yet-a human being might lurk somewhere under Gergely’s thick, highly polished steel armor.
And the veteran noncom didn’t get angry. He let out a harsh chuckle. “Not right now, thanks,” he said. “If that day comes, you’ll know. I’ll be screaming the way that poor damned Pole was. Am I right? Did you try to shrive him before you put him out of his misery?”
“I didn’t think it would do any harm.” Isztvan sounded more sheepish, more embarrassed, than he’d thought he would.
“My guess is, you did him as much good as a priest would’ve,” the sergeant said. A good Marxist-Leninist was almost bound to say that. But you didn’t have to follow the Communist line to feel that way. Anyone who’d been through a couple of wars and listened to too many people die in ugly ways might come to think it was true. More and more, Isztvan was coming to think it was himself.
–
Boris Gribkov eyed the Tu-4 under camouflage netting at the field outside of Leningrad. “You know, we’re lucky no real Americans have looked us over in either one of our planes,” he remarked.
“Why?” Vladimir Zorin asked. “They look as much like B-29s as real B-29s do.”
“But a lot of the real B-29s have naked girls on the nose, to remind the crews what they’re fighting for. Not all of them, but a lot,” Gribkov said. “I bet our maskirovka guys would have enjoyed their work more if they’d given us one of those.”
“I would’ve enjoyed it more, too,” the copilot said with a grin. “But I can’t see the guys who give the orders telling them to slap one on.”
“Mm, no,” Boris said. The commissars who gave such orders were stiff-necked, strait-laced…. They were prudes, was what they were. They didn’t have much fun, and they didn’t believe anyone else should, either.
Leonid Tsederbaum said, “Our fighter pilots would sometimes paint a swastika on the nose for every Nazi plane they shot down.”
“That’s true,” Boris said. “And some bomber crews would paint a bomb there for each mission they flew.”
“Uh-huh.” Tsederbaum nodded. “So I was thinking-maybe we could paint two cities on the nose of our beast here.”
He owned a formidable deadpan. He sounded so calm, so reasonable, that the pilot started to nod before he really heard what Tsederbaum said. Then he made a horrible face and exclaimed, “Fuck your mother!”
“I love you, too, sir.” Tsederbaum blew him a kiss.
Two cities. The Jew had asked him if he wanted to bomb London or Paris or Rome. He hadn’t had to rip the heart out of a metropolis from which a great empire had been ruled for centuries. That was luck, if you liked. He had smaller places on his conscience. Seattle and Bordeaux didn’t matter nearly so much to the people who didn’t live in them. If you did happen to live in a city where an A-bomb went off, you wouldn’t be happy afterwards. The best, the only, defense was to be somewhere else when that happened.
And if you were on the other end of the bomb, the only defense was not thinking about what you did in service to your country and to the world proletariat in arms. Gribkov remembered that the Stalin hadn’t been able to land the crew at Petropavlovsk. He remembered the craters scarring the cityscapes of Moscow and Leningrad. He was defending his country.
The Americans who’d bombed Soviet cities were defending their country, too. A few of the Hitlerites who’d got hanged or shot for running death camps had killed more people than those Americans and their Soviet counterparts. A few, but not many.
That wasn’t such a good thought to have. Gribkov wished he hadn’t had it. Well, that was why they made vodka. One of the things vodka did was blot out thoughts you didn’t feel like having. They’d eventually come back, but with Russians and the way they drank eventually could take a while.
There were also other ways to blot out those ugly thoughts. Hearing the base air-raid siren could do the trick, for instance. Pilot, copilot, and navigator looked at one another. Then they all started to run.
Maybe from force of habit, the construction crew that ran up this field had dug trenches by the quarters and others alongside the runways. Gribkov, Zorin, and Tsederbaum dashed for a runwayside trench. Tsederbaum was taller and skinnier than his Russian crewmates. He might have broken the Olympic record for the hundred meters. In any race, though, they would have won silver and bronze.
Tsederbaum leaped down into the trench. Gribkov and Zorin followed. They all crouched in the mud, careless of their uniforms. The trenches were there to protect base personnel from bomb fragments and from strafing fighters’ machine guns. They’d done that well enough during the Great Patriotic War. They could again-if they were dealing with bomb fragments and bullets.
If, on the other hand, a B-29 was buzzing ten or eleven kilometers up in the air and dropped an A-bomb here, all this was nothing but a joke. Gribkov didn’t think the Americans would send a B-29 into Soviet airspace in broad daylight. He wouldn’t have wanted to fly a daylight mission against, say, England. But you did what they told you to do, not what you wanted to do.
And the fear remained. The fear, if anything, got worse. He’d dropped A-bombs. He’d seen the horrible gouges they tore in Soviet cities. So he knew what they did. If one did that here, he could only hope everything ended before he even knew the end had begun.
Jet engines screamed as fighters scrambled at some nearby airstrip. Looking up, Gribkov watched the MiG-15s climb almost vertically. That kind of flight was so different from the Tu-4’s, it was almost as if he were watching a flying saucer perform. In the Tu-4, you counted yourself lucky to get off the ground at all, however slowly you did it.
The MiGs could reach a B-29’s ceiling. They might even reach it fast enough to keep the Americans from doing whatever they wanted to do. They might, Boris thought. It wasn’t a prayer. It wasn’t that far from one, either.
Those jet banshee wails dopplered out as the MiG-15s rose against high-altitude invaders. No sooner had they begun to fade, though, than Gribkov also heard piston-engine growls.
He frowned. Before he could say anything, Leonid Tsederbaum exclaimed, “Those aren’t ours!”
And they weren’t. They were half a dozen American Mustangs. The plane had been developed as a long-range escort fighter. It had protected U.S. bombers all the way from England to Berlin. Mount a small bomb under each wing and it turned into a long-range fighter-bomber.
The Mustangs roared by low overhead. They dropped their bombs. They shot up the field. They zoomed away. They were gone.
“Bozehmoi!” Vladimir Zorin sounded shaken to the core. “I thought I was back in Lithuania in 1944, with Focke-Wulfs strafing my strip.”
“If the MiGs can spot the Americans, they’ll dive on them,” Tsederbaum said. “Mustangs are fast, but not that fast.”
“I wonder how many missions those Mustang pilots flew during the last war,” Boris said. By the way they carried out this one, they had plenty of experience. Soviet fighter pilots with that kind of expertise were up at the front, not defending an airfield far behind it.