25
The doctor who examined Konstantin Morozov’s burned legs looked Jewish as Jewish could be: sallow skin, dark eyes, hooked nose. But she also filled out her white coat very nicely. “Sergeant, you look like you’re fit to go back on duty,” she said. “Do you feel fit?”
His flesh remained tender-or, if you wanted to tell the whole story, sore. He nodded anyway. “Yes, Comrade Doctor,” he answered. He might have said no to a sawbones who shaved and won another day or two on this cot. Telling a woman no was harder. It felt like admitting he had a needle dick.
“All right.” She wrote something on the paper in the clipboard she carried. “The rodina needs every man who can fight.” He was going to say I serve the Soviet Union! but she’d already moved on to the next iron cot.
They handed him a fresh set of tankman’s coveralls and a new leather helmet with built-in earphones. They gave him just enough time to put his sergeant’s shoulder boards on the coveralls. They they sent him over to the replacements’ assignment depot.
“What was your last duty before you were wounded?” asked the military clerk in charge of the depot. He wore a patch over his right eye, so chances were he’d paid his dues during the Great Patriotic War. He could still do a job like this, and save a whole man for combat.
“Tank commander,” Morozov replied proudly.
“Ochen khorosho,” the mutilated man said. “Have a seat on one of the benches. I don’t think you’ll need to wait long.”
Konstantin sat. The bench was too low. The building had been a school till war washed over it. Now half the roof had burned away. On one wall was a poster of a bulldozer clearing away rubble from the last war. Konstantin couldn’t read the words. It wasn’t his language, or even his alphabet. If he’d had to guess, though, he would have figured it said something like We’re getting back on our feet.
He scowled. You’re a bunch of fucking Fritzes, he thought. We flattened you once. Now we’ll do it again. After everything he’d seen in his own country during the last war, he wasn’t about to waste sympathy on Germans.
“I’m just out of the aid station,” he said to the corporal next to him. “Can you give me a smoke?”
“Sure thing, Comrade Sergeant.” The other guy let him have a papiros. He smoked one himself, too. They started talking. The corporal’s name was Igor Pechnikov. He added, “My father really did make brick stoves. How’s that for a kick in the head?”
“Funny,” Konstantin said. Pechnikov was a son of a stovemaker both by surname and for real. Names built from trades and the trades themselves hardly ever matched these days, but they did with him. Morozov asked, “What do you do in the army?”
“I’m an RPG man,” the other guy answered. “A 155 took out most of my squad, so they’re putting me in a new unit. How about you?”
“We probably shouldn’t be friends. I’m in a tank, and you go around blowing them up,” Morozov said.
“Not ours. The enemy’s,” the corporal said.
“I do understand that, yes.” Konstantin was about to say more, but the one-eyed clerk chose that moment to shout his name. He thumped Pechnikov on the shoulder, shouted “I serve the Soviet Union!”, and hurried over to the clerk’s little table. His legs hurt more than he wished they did; he could have used those extra couple of days on his back.
A captain stood there. He eyed Morozov the way a hungry man would eye pork sausages in a butcher’s shop. “A tank commander, are you?” he said.
“That’s right, Comrade Captain,” Morozov replied.
“Are you fit?”
“Sir, they wouldn’t have let me leave the aid station if I wasn’t.” That was nonsense, and the captain had to know it as well as Konstantin did. Aid stations were for getting people back into the fight fast.
The officer didn’t complain, though. He just said, “I’m Arkady Lapshin. Come along with me.”
Konstantin came. A jeep waited outside: Lend-Lease from the last war or captured in this one. The lance-corporal behind the wheel saluted Lapshin, nodded to Konstantin, and zoomed away as soon as they got in.
Sometimes he stayed on the road, sometimes not. The going was often better away from it. Much of the toughest fighting had been along the highways, and they showed it. The jeep went wherever the driver wanted it to. For a vehicle with tires, not tracks, it got around.
Artillery began to fire as they neared the front. Lapshin took it in stride. Morozov tried not to fidget, there on the jeep’s hard back seat. He was used to armor between himself and shell fragments. These were Soviet shells going out, but American shells were liable to start coming in to answer them.
He thought the driver would take him into a tank park, the way they’d done things the last time he needed a new machine. But he’d had three crewmen out of four then. Now he was the sole survivor. If he hadn’t been head and shoulders out of the T-54 when it got hit, he’d be as dead as the rest of them. Luck. All luck. Or God, if you could take God seriously.
No tank park this time. A tank under some fruit trees. Three men were working on the engine: a corporal, a lance-corporal, and a private. The jeep stopped. Lapshin hopped out. “This way,” he said, so Konstantin followed him.
The three soldiers-especially the corporal-eyed Morozov with what could only be disdain. He knew what that had to mean. Their old commander must have stopped one, maybe when he stood up in his cupola. The corporal had to be the gunner. He would have wanted command-and the promotion likely to go with it-for himself. How big a pain in the neck would he be now that he hadn’t got them?
Captain Lapshin was, or affected to be, oblivious to the sour looks. “Here’s your new commander, boys,” he said cheerfully. “Sergeant Morozov did it in the last war, too. He’s just over a wound. Morozov, here’s your crew: Juris Eigims, Gennady Kalyakin, and Vazgen Sarkisyan.” He introduced them in order of rank, and almost surely in the order gunner-driver-loader.
Great, Morozov thought. Only one other Slav. Sarkisyan was squat and swarthy, with a beard he’d need to shave twice a day. He looked like the Armenian he was, in other words. Kalyakin had a Byelorussian accent. Eigims…Yes, Eigims would be trouble.
By his name, he was a Latvian, or maybe a Lithuanian. Either way, he would have been a kid when the USSR annexed his homeland. Some of the Balts were still pissy over that, not that they could do anything about it. Pissy or not, he’d have to shoot straight if he wanted to keep breathing. But how many other ways would he try to undercut his new superior? By the scowl on his blue-eyed face, as many as he could.
“What were you guys doing with the engine?” Morozov asked.
“Just trying to get it running smoother,” Eigims answered. His Russian held a musical lilt. He seemed fluent enough, which was good. Sarkisyan didn’t talk much, but a loader didn’t need a whole lot of Russian. As long as he got the difference between AP and HE, they’d do fine. A gunner, though, had to be able to talk and to understand.
“How’s the fuel? How much water in it? How are the filters?” Konstantin asked the basic questions. Water in the fuel was worse than in a gasoline engine. And diesel fuel, being thicker than gasoline, carried more dirt and impurities along with it. With bad filters, crud could mess up your machinery in nothing flat.
“All seem all right. Check for yourself if you care to, Comrade Sergeant.” By the way Eigims said it, Konstantin realized they’d gummed up the engine on purpose somewhere. Where? That was for him to find.
And he did, too: clogged injectors on two of the engine’s cylinders. He cleaned them out. “Fire it up now,” he said. “You should be able to hear a difference.” Juris Eigims kicked at the dirt. If he’d disliked Konstantin before, he hated him now.