This new tank…These new guys…Vladislav Kalyakin, the driver, was a kid, but he was all right. He was a Byelorussian, a fellow Slav. The loader, Vazgen Sarkisyan, was an Armenian without much Russian. But a loader didn’t need to know much. Like most tank crewmen, Morozov had started there himself. And, as blackasses went, Armenians were pretty much okay. Plenty of other swarthy types from the Caucasus were worse, anyway.
But Juris Eigims, the gunner, he was trouble with a capital T. He was either Latvian or Lithuanian; Konstantin wasn’t sure which. Either way, he didn’t like Russians. He didn’t like it that his little pissant land was part of the USSR, the way it had been part of the Russian Empire before World War I. When he was a kid, it had been its own two-kopek country. Nationalist bandits still prowled the Baltics, the way they did in the Ukraine.
And Juris Eigims really didn’t like Konstantin. That was personal, not political. As Konstantin had lost his crew, so these guys had lost their commander. Eigims must have thought he would take charge of this tank. Instead, he got a Russian sergeant dropped on him. By his attitude, he would have preferred an atom bomb.
Morozov would have preferred a puff adder in the gunner’s seat. One of those would have been less dangerous. But he had what he had, not what he would have preferred. Somehow, he had to get the best out of Eigims-and keep him from going over the hill first chance he saw.
For now, he wriggled out from under the tank. Half a dozen other armored behemoths had stopped nearby, some with camouflage nets over them, the rest under trees. The Red Army always remembered maskirovka. Here in the Ruhr, there weren’t that many trees to hide under. Konstantin had never seen so many towns packed so close together. Russia had nothing like this.
Sarkisyan crawled out, too. He’d been sleeping next to Morozov. “I must have woke you up,” Konstantin said. “Sorry about that.”
“Is of nothings, Comrade Sergeant.” The Armenian shrugged broad shoulders. He was built like a brick, a good shape for a shell-jerker. Stubble darkened his cheeks and chin; he really needed to shave twice a day. His hairline came down almost to his tangled eyebrows. He would have made a tolerable werewolf.
Juris Eigims, by contrast, was slim, blond, and blue-eyed. He looked as if he’d come straight from the Waffen-SS: one more reason he and Konstantin hit it off so well.
“What’s going on?” he asked. He spoke much better Russian than Vazgen Sarkisyan, but it was plainly a foreign language for him. His native tongue left him with an odd, singsong accent that set Morozov’s teeth on edge.
“Not much, or it doesn’t seem like it,” the tank commander answered. And it was pretty quiet. It was getting light, but the sun hadn’t risen yet. The air smelled of smoke, but of old, sour smoke-nothing new or close. A battery of Soviet 105s boomed, one gun after another, as if going through limbering-up exercises. They too, though, were off in the distance. Up ahead of the tanks only spatters of rifle fire cut the silence-hardly anything.
Corporal Eigims cocked his head to one side, studying the sounds as gravely as if he were a Marshal of the Soviet Union, not a Latvian punk. “Think we’ll break into Bocholt today?” he asked.
Konstantin shrugged, as Sarkisyan had earlier. “Depends on what they’ve moved up to stop us. One way or the other, we’ll find out.” He scratched himself. “What I think is, I want some breakfast.”
Eigims’ grin made him almost human, though he still looked too much like a German for Konstantin’s comfort. “Breakfast-yeah!”
“Breakfast?” Vladislav Kalyakin emerged from under the T-54 just in time to hear the magic word.
“Breakfast,” Konstantin agreed. They ate sausage and stale bread stolen from the last village they’d rolled through, and washed it down with hot tea. Kalyakin had a little aluminum stove he’d taken from a dead Englishman, and enough of the tablets that fueled it to let them brew some without making a fire.
When they were fueled, they checked out the tank. As Morozov went over the engine, he eyed Juris Eigims. The Balt had tried to show him up when he took over the T-54, but ended up with egg on his face instead. He wasn’t pulling anything cute today, though.
They had half a load of ammo and half a tank of diesel fueclass="underline" enough to go on for a while, anyhow. Both sides were doing everything they could to foul up their foes’ supply chains. The bomb that smashed Paris was supposed to make things hard on the Americans that way.
No sooner had Konstantin got into the commander’s seat in the turret than Captain Lapshin’s voice sounded in his earphones: “Ready to move out?”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Morozov answered.
Away they went, and straight into trouble. The morning quiet popped like a soap bubble. One of the T-54s in the company took a hit from a 155 that had to be firing over open sights. What the heavy gun was doing so far forward, Konstantin had no idea. But it would have smashed a destroyer, not just a tank. The only hope was, the crew never knew what hit them.
Machine-gun bullets clattered off his own tank’s glacis plate and turret. The infantrymen moving up with the T-54s puckered their assholes on account of machine guns. Those rounds would chip his machine’s paint, but that was about it. But he needed the foot soldiers, too, to keep the sons of bitches with bazookas at a distance.
Il-10s roared by at rooftop height, gunning and rocketing the enemy. Morozov loved Shturmoviks. They were heavily armored-almost flying tanks themselves. They could take a lot of punishment, and they dealt out even more. They looked old-fashioned in the new jet age, but they could hang around a battlefield better than any jet.
Another T-54 stopped short, spewing smoke from the turret. Hatches flew open. Men bailed out. One of them was burning, the way Konstantin had been when he got blasted out of his tank. He hoped the luckless tanker lived. He hoped this machine didn’t get hit the same way.
The Soviet drive stalled. The enemy had too many men, too many guns, and too many tanks in front of Bocholt. This wasn’t like the war on the Eastern Front. You couldn’t get around the foe and in behind him. He had something nasty waiting for you everywhere. You had to push through him, push him back. But not today.
–
Daisy Baxter tried to run the Owl and Unicorn the way her dead husband’s family had run it for generations. Changes did come to the pub in Fakenham every so often. Flush toilets got added during Queen Victoria’s reign, electric lights between the old queen’s passing and the start of the First World War. These days, a wireless set-the Yanks from the Sculthorpe air base called it a radio, and so did more and more locals-sat on a shelf behind the bar. Sometimes people listened to it. More often, they ignored it.
But those were cosmetic changes. The smoky air, the potato crisps and meat pies and other salty pub grub, and, most important, the best bitter in wooden barrels in the cellar-those hadn’t changed in a long time. Daisy saw no reason they should.
All of Fakenham had flush toilets these days, and electricity, and wireless sets, and automobiles. A couple of prosperous gents even boasted a telly in their homes. People who fancied banging the little East Anglian town’s drum said it was modern as next week.
Daisy didn’t call them a pack of stupid windbags when they went on like that. She might have thought it-she did think it-but she didn’t say it. The way Fakenham looked to her, the externals might change, but the internals never did. Motorcars and televisions be damned. People in a mid-twentieth-century English small town still thought the way they had in a mid-eighteenth-century English small town, and all too likely in a mid-fourteenth-century English small town as well.