“Thank you, Albert Einstein,” Pete replied. After a moment, he added, “Fuck you, Albert Einstein.”
His jimjams didn’t keep him from passing shells to the loader when planes brought targets overhead. If slow-moving strips of orange cloth had dive-bombed the Boise, the Marines at her secondary armament would have blown them out of the sky.
A Navy lieutenant warned, “Keep an eyeball peeled for submarines. We aren’t within safe waters.”
He outranked the leathernecks-a two-striper was the equivalent of a Marine Corps captain. So they couldn’t say much while he was in earshot. Once he’d gone… That was a different story.
“What? He thinks we’re too dumb to look if he don’t tell us to?” Orsatti groused.
“He must figure we’re like ordinary swabbies,” Pete put in. That got some laughs. Marines were convinced sailors were idiots in training to be morons. Of course, it worked both ways, which was one of the reasons sailors and Marines from the same ship sometimes brawled when they got liberty at the same time.
One of the other guys in the gun crew just said, “Whistleass pecker-head.” That summed things up as well as any other two words Pete could have thought of.
No one saw a periscope, or even imagined he saw a periscope. The hydrophones didn’t report any contacts. There was talk that the Boise would get a fancy new version as part of her refit. Sonar was the name Pete had heard. He didn’t know much about it, but he was in favor of anything that would help keep them from stopping a torpedo.
They made it back to Pearl undamaged. That young lieutenant seemed convinced they got back for no other reason than his own enormous heroism. The leathernecks laughed behind their hands. Otherwise, they kept their opinions to themselves.
Ivan Kuchkov hated squelching through the mud. He hadn’t had to do that when he was in the Red Air Force, or not nearly so much of it, anyhow. But his only other choices were falling behind and letting the Nazis capture him (a bad bet) or getting wounded or killed (a worse one). So squelch he did.
Ukrainian mud seemed particularly oozy and bottomless, too. Everybody said Ukrainian soil-the famous black earth-was fertile beyond compare. He supposed that was so: this country was all kolkhozes. But, when the rasputitsa came, the black earth also turned goopy beyond compare.
“Avram!” Ivan called. Then he raised his voice to yell “Avram!” again, louder this time. The point man was well out ahead of the section, the way he was supposed to be.
He stopped when he finally heard Kuchkov. “What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” he shouted back. He could afford to make some noise, as Ivan could; no Germans were in the neighborhood. Or if the Germans were, things were even more fouled up than the brass wanted to admit. Kuchkov guessed-no, on second thought he was sure-that was possible, maybe even likely.
He slogged forward through the muck to catch up to Sasha Davidov. If there were Fascists around, he didn’t want to call the point man back. Then the whole section might run into them without warning. That he might run into them without warning occurred to him only when he’d almost reached the Jew. He hung on to his PPD-34 a little tighter once it did.
And the first question out of his mouth was, “Any fucking sign of the pricks?”
Avram shook his head. “Not around here, Sergeant.” He pointed ahead. “Once we get over that swell of ground, we’ll be able to see farther. Of course, if there are any Germans on the far side of it, they’re liable to spot us, too.”
Ivan grunted. Normally, he would have had no more use for a skinny, swarthy little kike than any other Russian of peasant stock did. But times weren’t normal-not even a little bit. The game had changed as soon as the USSR and the Nazis actually came to grips. Some Russians and more Ukrainians and people from the Caucasus liked Hitler better than Stalin. They’d desert if they got the chance. Not even the politruks could stop them all the time.
You didn’t need to worry about the Jews, though. They were in the fight to the last bullet. They had to be. If the Nazis caught them, they’d get a bullet, all right. A Russian might be able to surrender. No guarantees, but he might. Zhids didn’t have a prayer. The Germans casually murdered them, the same way they got rid of the political officers who fell into their hands.
Pointing to that same swell of ground, Kuchkov asked, “Can you haul your sorry ass to the top and over without letting the Fascist pussies spot you?”
Avram was no braver than he had to be. But then, people who were braver than they had to be had a way of not living long. He tossed a papiros into the mud-he didn’t want some alert Fritz noticing the coal or the smoke. He nodded: not with any great enthusiasm, but he did. “I can do it.”
“All right. You go ahead, then. But some of the clumsy cuntfaced bitches in our outfit, you know they’d trip over their dicks if they tried, right?” Ivan said. He waited for the Jew to nod again before he went on, “So I’m gonna lead our assholes around to the left. If it’s clear, you fucking meet up with us there. Got it?”
“ Yob tvoyu mat’, Sergeant,” Davidov assured him.
Ivan burst into raucous laughter and slapped him on the back. Literally, what the Jew said meant Fuck your mother. In a different tone of voice or at a different time, it might have made Kuchkov try to murder him. But the filthy phrase lay at the bottom of mat. It could have a multitude of meanings, foul or fair. What Avram was getting across here was You bet your ass.
Fair enough. He was betting his own ass that he could do what he said he could do. “Go on, then,” Ivan told him. “You get into trouble, I’ll send some of the shitheads after you.”
Davidov nodded and went on. If he got into trouble, Ivan’s promise probably wouldn’t do him any good. He had to know that, but he moved up anyhow. He might be a kike, but he was all right.
The rest of the section took its own sweet time catching up to Kuchkov. The men weren’t fools. They could tell they were pretty safe where they were. The farther ahead they moved, the better-or rather, the worse-their chance of bumping into Nazis with guns.
Kuchkov profanely explained how they were going to skirt the swell of ground ahead. He also told half a dozen soldiers to rush to Avram’s rescue if the point man’s luck ran out. “You fuck that up, you better be more scared of me than you are of those German walking foreskins,” he added. The soldiers nodded. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of Ivan didn’t know him very well.
It had been drizzling. The rain started coming down harder as he took his section where it needed to go. In a way, that was good: the Germans would have more trouble noticing them. In another, not so good: the Red Army men would have more trouble spotting the Fascists.
Avram carried a PPD-34, too. You wanted to be able to throw a lot of lead at the bad guys in a hurry if you came across them when you didn’t expect to. Ivan kept his head cocked toward the top of the low hillock. He’d hear that snarl through the rain’s plashing.
It didn’t come. He got the rest of the section where they needed to go. Then he waited. Avram Davidov materialized as if out of thin air. “I think there are some Germans in the trees along the stream up ahead,” he said.
“You sure?” Ivan asked him.
“Pretty sure, Comrade Sergeant,” Davidov answered. “I don’t have any field glasses, but they looked like Germans, sure as the devil.”
“Bugger the cocksucking Devil,” Kuchkov said. He turned to another Red Army man. “Yuri!”
“ Da, Comrade Sergeant?”
“Go back and tell the company CO that we’ve bumped into the fucking Fascists. Ask him if he wants to reinforce us for a proper attack or if we should just sit tight and keep an eye on the pussies. You got me?”
“Da,” Yuri said again, and accurately gave back what Ivan had said. Like his sergeant, he could no more read and write than he could fly. He relied on his memory in ways people who could write never did. He was also pretty good at traveling cross-country-not so good as Avram, but good enough. Off he went, at the fastest clip the mud allowed.