Every once in a while, though… By all accounts, Hitler had been that kind of ferocious loner. He’d spent just about all the last war as a runner at the front, and he’d come through with hardly a scratch. You couldn’t begin to figure the odds on that. The way it looked to Luc, God had dropped the ball there.
He laughed at himself. “Fat lot anybody can do about it now,” he said, and lit one of his new Gauloises.
Chapter 20
Instead of flying out of an airstrip in front of Smolensk, Stas Mouradian was flying out of one east of the city. That suggested that the fighting wasn’t going the way the Politburo and General Secretary Stalin had in mind.
Of course, other such hints had appeared long before this. When the war started, Stas had flown out of an airstrip in Slovakia. Slovakia lay a long way west of where he was flying from now. So did Poland. So did Byelorussia. He’d flown from airstrips in those places, too.
Looking at that progression (even if you ignored his detour to the Far East, which also hadn’t turned out well), you might start to suspect that Soviet leadership left something to be desired. As a matter of fact, Stas had started suspecting as much even in Slovakia.
He’d also suspected he’d better keep quiet about it. The enemy could kill you. So could your own side. Defeatism was a capital crime. If the Nazis shot you down, you at least had a chance of getting things over with in a hurry. Once the Chekists started in on you, they’d take their time and really make you sorry.
He wondered how long his squadron would be able to keep flying. Lately, days had been dawning with clouds massing in the northwest and drifting across the sky, covering it ever more thickly. The fall rasputitsa was coming. Airstrips, roads between towns, and everything else would turn to mud.
He also wondered why Red Air Force engineers hadn’t built more paved airfields around here. They might have given the Soviet Union a vital edge in its fight with the Fascists and their allies. Maybe the engineers had had other things to do, things they found more important. What those things might be, Stas couldn’t imagine.
Even saying there should be paved runways near Smolensk, or wondering aloud why there weren’t, was one more thing that might make the NKVD notice you. Stas knew they had a dossier on him. Well, they had a dossier on everybody. But the folder with his name on it would be thicker than most. Every so often, he couldn’t stop himself from hinting that not all the men who led the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were grand and towering geniuses.
The squadron took off from its dirt runway and flew north and a little west toward Velizh, another town threatened by the Nazis. If the enemy swung around behind Velizh, the fortress might fall even if it wasn’t immediately overrun. The Germans had shown how good they were at biting off pockets with their armor and then using guns and infantry to chew up the Soviet forces still inside.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky stayed in the clouds as much as he could. He had to be navigating by compass and dead reckoning and perhaps a little un-Soviet prayer. All the same, Stas thought he would have flown the same way were he leading the squadron. Unlike the SB-2, the Pe-2 was no clay pigeon for the Bf-109. It was about as fast as the German fighter. But the Messerschmitt could outclimb, outdive, and outturn it. Dogfights with 109s remained a bad bet.
When Tomashevsky ordered the Red Air Force bombers down below the cloud layer, down to where they could see-and be seen-once more, Stas expected them to have to grope around for Velizh. Russia was full of fields and forests. He’d traveled all the way across it to the Far East. He knew how enormous it was, and how lucky you had to be to find anything on the first try.
“Bozhemoi!” Ivan Kulkaanen exclaimed as the last rags of mist blew away from the windscreen and the horizon stretched out to kilometers. They were right over the town their bomb loads were supposed to defend.
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Mouradian said. Was the squadron commander that good a navigator, or had he filled an inside straight? Stas didn’t think he could do it again, but he’d done it once, and nothing else mattered for this mission.
The war was laid out below them, as if on a situation map. Soviet trenches in front of Velizh kept the Nazis from storming in. But the Red Army had to defend long lines, and its strength was spread thin. The Germans were forming assault columns. If one of them broke through, the Soviet soldiers in the trenches would have to fall back to keep from being bypassed.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky’s static-distorted voice resounded in Stas’ earphones: “We will bomb the central Fascist column. Acknowledge.”
“Bombing the central column-plane eight acknowledging,” Mouradian replied. Other pilots also showed they’d heard. Again, Stas would have made the same choice. That German force looked thicker and more muscular than either of the other two. How would it look after a good many tonnes of high explosives came down on its head?
As a matter of fact, Tomashevsky didn’t bomb the head of the column. He released his presents several kilometers to the west. The other Pe-2s followed him in. They were supposed to bomb the same place he did. But followers never did. They didn’t want to hang around any longer than they had to. The Nazis were already throwing up fierce antiaircraft fire.
Because of all that, the Pe-2 pilots following the squadron commander didn’t drop their bombs right where he had. They bombed short-and progressively shorter as plane after plane unloaded. Stas was no more immune than anyone else. He’d seen-and been part of-the effect on every mission he’d flown.
What he’d never seen before was someone taking advantage of it. Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky understood ahead of time what his flyers would do. Their bombs fell ever more toward the front of the German column, and probably smashed the hell out of it. If he’d blasted the head of the column himself, most of the rest of the squadron’s bombs would have landed short. Some of them might have come down on the poor bastards defending Velizh.
Doctrine, as Stas knew, was for the squadron leader to put his bombs exactly where they belonged. Doctrine decreed that the other pilots would of course place their loads right where he had. In the Red Air Force no less than the Red Army, doctrine carried the weight of holy writ.
What Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky had done worked better than doctrine. It couldn’t have been an accident or an error. Stas admired the squadron commander’s cleverness. He thought it was a shame Tomashevsky wouldn’t be able to spread the improvement to other officers who led squadrons. When he submitted his report, he would have to say he’d conformed to orders in every particular. Officers who did anything else wound up explaining themselves to the NKVD, which no one in his right mind wanted to do.
“Back to base,” Tomashevsky ordered. Again, Stas acknowledged. He was never sorry for permission to get the hell out of there.
Kulkaanen peered down at the German column as Mouradian turned the Pe-2 toward the neighborhood of Smolensk once more. He shook his head in pleased surprise. “Boy, we walloped the snot out of them, didn’t we?” he said.
“We sure did,” Stas agreed dryly. Did his copilot have the slightest idea of how they’d walloped the snot out of the Nazis? If he did, he was doing his best to hide it.
That thought brought Mouradian up short. Ivan Kulkaanen might be doing his very best to conceal any surplus intelligence he owned. Maybe you would get promoted if you showed you had more on the ball than the other junior lieutenants around you. Or maybe you’d get… what was the word farmers used? Culled, that was it. A sunflower that stood taller than the others in the field almost begged for the scythe.