“I’m okay,” he answered. “I can always stop and go behind a tree if I have to.” He drooped out his tongue like a panting dog and mimed lifting a leg. She giggled.
It was cool and clear outside. The moon had set not long before. With lights all across the country blacked out, though, stars sparkled bright and clear. The Milky Way gleamed, ghost-pale. Daisy squeezed Bruce again. They’d just driven the jeep out of town when more jet engines howled and antiaircraft guns thundered rage at them.
“Maybe it’s not such a hot night to stop anywhere,” Bruce said. “If you want, I’ll take you straight back to your place.”
“Don’t be silly!” Daisy shook her head. “You’ll do no such thing!”
“Okey-doke.” This time, he slid his hand under the hem of her dress and slid it up her stockinged thigh toward his target. He knew all about bull’s-eyes, too. “Then we’ll do something else.”
Which, when they found a secluded lane near a pear orchard, they did. More fireworks kept going off in the sky, but they had fireworks of their own. Daisy hardly noticed the show overhead, or even the roars of bombs going off. If Bruce did, he gave no sign she could sense, and all her senses were straining.
Afterwards, though, he did say “Lousy Beagles are busy tonight” as he peeled off his rubber. Then he laughed. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am gonna walk over to one of those nice trees. Beer does take its revenge.”
Daisy’s manners were too good to let her tell him I told you so. She was distracted a moment later, anyhow. Another jet roared low over the quiet English countryside. Two more were right behind, shooting off machine guns and underwing rockets.
One of those rockets scored a hit. The fleeing plane-the Beagle?-blew apart in midair. Flaming wreckage pinwheeled toward the ground. One big blazing chunk flew straight at the jeep. Daisy watched it, open-mouthed…for a split second too long. Then she started to jump out.
–
Lieutenant Stanislav Kosior ran around keeping an eye on the men in his company like a mother hen herding along a new brood of chicks. “Come on!” he called. “Come on, come on! Into the trucks! Hurry up! Pile on in! You can do it!”
“Do you know what’s going on, Comrade Lieutenant?” Ihor Shevchenko asked him.
“They’re pulling this whole division out of the line,” Kosior said. “They have some other duty in mind for us. What that is, they haven’t told me yet. Whatever it is, I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Corporal, and so do you.”
“Yes, sir.” Ihor thought of the move a little differently. Whatever it was, he was stuck with it. He helped some of the guys from his squad climb aboard a truck, then scrambled in himself. It was getting dark outside the canvas-covered bed of the truck. That pleased him. Motor convoys on the road in broad daylight made tasty, tempting targets for fighters with guns and rockets.
Away they went. In the darkness, of course, the driver couldn’t see the potholes and dodge them. Ihor suspected he could barely see the road-or maybe the trouble was that he barely knew how to drive. They headed east when they set out, which made sense: everything west of where they had been belonged to the imperialists. But they kept going, much farther and much longer than Ihor had expected.
“I think we’re back in the German Democratic Republic,” one of the soldiers said after a while.
Ihor needed a few seconds to remember that that was the official name for the part of Germany the USSR had kept after the Nazis got finished off. German Communists ran it these days, but Communists from the Soviet Union ran them. None of the Soviet satellites could do much without permission from Stalin and his henchmen. The German Democratic Republic could do next to nothing.
The soldiers piled out at a town called Juterbog. A man who’d fought in Marshal Koniev’s army had gone through it in 1945. He said it lay south of Berlin. Ihor couldn’t see much of it. What he could see told him the Fritzes hadn’t rebuilt it since Koniev’s troops overran it.
They got black bread and salted herrings there, with tea to wash them down. Once they’d eaten, the lieutenant gathered the company together. “Well, boys, now I know what we’ll be doing next,” Kosior said.
“What’s that, sir?” several men asked, Ihor among them.
Kosior paused to light a match to get a papiros going. The flame briefly lit his earnest features from below and made him look harder and tougher than usual. “There’s a reactionary uprising in the Polish People’s Republic,” he answered. “The crypto-Fascists have been lying in wait, hoping for their chance. Now they think they’ve found it. They want to detach Poland from the roster of progressive states and bring back the squalid military dictatorship from the years of Pilsudski and Smigly-Ridz. But we won’t let them get away with it, will we?”
“No, Comrade Lieutenant!” the Red Army men chorused. Ihor made sure Kosior heard his voice. The less eager you really felt, the more eager you had to show yourself to be.
“Khorosho. Ochen khorosho. I wouldn’t expect anything less from good Soviet men like you,” Kosior said. “Now I need to tell you, along with counterrevolutionary soldiers you may also find reactionary civilians they’ve seduced with their lying propaganda. Some of them may speak Russian. Pay no attention to anything they tell you. They’re in the pay of American and English spymasters. We liberated Poland from the German Fascists in the last war. Now we have to clear out the Polish Fascists who hid their venom till they thought they could hurt us the most.”
“We serve the Soviet Union!” the soldiers said as one.
They got to unroll their blankets and stretch out on the ground in Juterbog. That beat the devil out of trying to sleep sitting up in a truck bouncing along rough roads. After more bread and herrings and tea in the morning, they got rolling again. They were far enough inside the zone of Soviet control to make attack from the air only a small fear.
As soon as they got into Poland, the paving petered out and the road turned into a dirt track. They hadn’t gone far before Ihor, looking back through the opening in the canvas at the rear of the truck, saw a burnt-out T-34/85 in a field. It might have been sitting there since 1945. But that was about thirty tonnes of steel. They would have salvaged it between then and now…wouldn’t they? And the carcass looked fresh, not all rusty and dusty.
Bare-chested Red Army artillerymen served 105s and 155s in gun pits plainly just dug. The guns boomed. Cartridge cases jumped from the breeches. Loaders slammed in fresh rounds with fists clenched so they wouldn’t snag their fingers in the mechanism. Ihor remembered noticing that trick during the last war.
Then a machine gun opened up on the front of the column. It was an MG-34, the MG-42’s older and almost equally fearsome cousin. Maybe that meant the Poles using it were indeed Nazis. Or maybe it just meant they could get their hands on leftover German hardware.
Whatever it meant, Ihor’s truck jerked to a stop. “Out!” he said. “Out and down! We’ll hunt the fucker to death!”
Not fifteen seconds after the soldiers bailed out of the truck, a burst from the machine gun punched holes in the canvas cover-and, by the clanks, in the driver’s compartment and engine as well. Ihor cautiously raised his head a few centimeters as he dug in with his entrenching tool. Flashes came from behind some bushes in the meadow.
“There it is!” he yelled. “Riflemen, make the gunners keep their heads down. Submachine gunners, forward with me!” With his Kalashnikov, he could have hung back and fired from this longer distance. But the red stripe on each shoulder board told him he had to set an example.
Bullets cracked past him. He flopped down after his rush and squeezed off a short burst at the MG-34. The guys with PPDs and PPShs were firing, too, but they were too far away to have much chance of hitting anything. He wasn’t.