Would it have been more dangerous than thinking that Stalin’s greed had led him into an enormous mistake? Now there was an interesting question for any Soviet citizen to contemplate! As long as you kept your mouth shut, you had a chance of staying safe (from the NKVD, anyhow; the Luftwaffe was a different story). But Mouradian had heard-as who in the Soviet Union had not? — of people arrested for no better reason than an expression some Chekist didn’t fancy. Those people went into a camp as readily as the ones brave or crazy enough to criticize the regime out loud. They came out of the camps as readily, too: which is to say, just about never.
The distant rumble of artillery distracted Stas from such gloomy reflections. He cocked his head to one side, listening. Those were Russian guns. That was good. No-it was better. He would really have had something to worry about if he heard German guns from here.
But the squadron had been flying out of this airstrip for only about a week. When the Pe-2s got here, you couldn’t hear anybody’s guns. Stas had been used to fields farther forward. He’d been used to, if not happy about, the sound of guns. Once or twice, he’d had to fly off a runway enemy artillery was suddenly able to reach. Being out of earshot of the front had felt relaxing.
Now he wasn’t any more. He wasn’t so relaxed, either.
At the edge of the airstrips, a technician wearing earphones manned a sound detector that looked like nothing so much as half a dozen enormous hearing trumpets. They could pick up approaching enemy planes at distances greater than the naked eye could reach. They could some of the time, at any rate. When everything went just right. When other noise didn’t distract or confuse the technicians.
There has to be a better way, Stas thought. If he knew what that way was, they’d pin a Hero of the Soviet Union medal on him in a flash. At a guess, it had something to do with radio. Everything modern and scientific seemed to. His guesses stopped right there. He was a pretty good pilot, but he’d never make an electrical engineer.
The technician jerked off the earphones and ran to a bell mounted on a nearby post. He rang the bell as if his life depended on it. And his life was liable to, for he shouted, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”
A kicked anthill would have shown more chaos, but not a lot more. People ran every which way. Antiaircraft gunners manned their cannons and pointed them west. The technician was pointing in that direction, but Stas couldn’t tell whether the gunners followed his lead or simply knew German planes were most likely to appear from that direction. Pilots and groundcrew men jumped into zigzagging trenches to shelter from the expected attack. Some of them had rifles. If they fired at the Luftwaffe planes, it might make them feel better. It was unlikely to do anything else.
Stas realized he was the only man just standing there. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t jumping. He wasn’t training an antiaircraft gun in the desired direction or chambering a round in his Mosin-Nagant.
Now he could hear the ominous drone of German airplane engines without the fancy sound detector. Their note was different from that of Soviet powerplants. It seemed deeper, and somehow imbued with sinister purpose. Maybe that was Stas’ imagination. On the other hand, he knew he was far from the only Soviet fighting man who imagined the same thing.
“What the hell are you doing there, you stupid fucking idiot? Growing roots like a beet?” a groundcrew sergeant shouted. “You don’t get your cock in gear, they’ll plant you, all right!”
Where the rising drone from those bombers hadn’t unfrozen Stas, the sergeant’s profanity did. That might have been because it was aimed at him personally, unlike the bomb loads that would come whistling down any second now. He sprinted toward the closest trench.
He hadn’t even got there before the antiaircraft guns started pounding away for all they were worth. He jumped in. Somebody down below caught him and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, without noticing who.
“Any time.” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky didn’t even sound sarcastic. Squadron commanders caught on the ground in a bombing raid needed to run for their life like anybody else. When they jumped into a trench, they had to hope somebody would grab them and keep them from falling on their face. It was, of course, simply an application of the Golden Rule, no matter how much scorn a good Marxist-Leninist would heap on the book from which that Rule came.
During the last war, someone had claimed there were no atheists in the trenches. Stas didn’t know if he would have gone that far. He did know he had to make a conscious effort to keep from crossing himself when the Luftwaffe bombers came overhead. You didn’t dare reveal too much. His hand twitched, but that was all it did, even when the bombs started bursting on and around the strip.
“Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” A man in mechanic’s coveralls was too scared to worry about what he gave away. He crossed himself again and again, as if possessed. He was only a corporal. Maybe he thought he was too small a fish for the NKVD to care about. If so, he was an optimist. Or maybe he believed none of the other frightened men in the trench with him would betray him to the NKVD. Well, he had a chance of being right about that. How good a chance? Stas wasn’t willing to risk it.
Something not far enough away blew up. “The ammunition store for one of our guns-maybe for a battery,” Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky said.
Mouradian nodded. That was what it had sounded like to him, too. Something else was on his mind: “Where are our fighter planes, Comrade Colonel?”
He didn’t think they could possibly be where Tomashevsky suggested. For one thing, he’d always supposed the Devil was male. But wherever they were, they weren’t here. And that was a crying shame. Of all the German bombers, only the Ju-87 had anything close to the Soviet Pe-2’s performance. The Do-17s and He-111s overhead would have been easy meat for even biplane Polikarpov fighters, let alone their monoplane cousins or the hotter, faster new MiGs. Would have been… Some of the saddest words in Russian or any other language.
At last, after doing what they’d come to do, the Germans went away. Soviet fire had brought down one of them. The shattering roar when its whole bomb load blew as it hit the ground almost shook Stas’ fillings loose. But when he stuck his head up to look around, he grimaced. For all the destruction the Nazis had worked, they hadn’t paid much of a price. Most of the buildings around the airstrip were either gone or burning. The strip itself was cratered like photos of the moon. And four columns of greasy black smoke marked Red Air Force bombers’ funeral pyres. Stas hoped none of them was his. Without revetments, it would have been worse. Even with them, it was plenty bad enough.
And Stas had no idea if any bombs had come down in the trenches where men huddled. He also had no idea where the squadron would fly its next mission from. He was sure of only one thing: it wouldn’t be from here, not for a while.
Little by little, Narvik improved as a U-boat base. As far as torpedoes and diesel fuel and repair facilities went, there had never been anything wrong with it. You couldn’t take on as much fresh food there as you could at a base in Germany or even farther south in Norway. That made the ratings grumble-it made Julius Lemp grumble, too-but it wasn’t the end of the world.
But a U-boat base, a proper U-boat base, didn’t just tend to the boats. It also took care of the men who sailed them. When sailors came back from a long, uncomfortable cruise where, like as not, their lives had been in deadly danger, they wanted to blow off steam. They needed to blow off steam. They wanted good booze and bad women. Bad booze would do in a pinch, but good women were right out.