Try explaining as much to a Chekist, though. To the men who’d been headquartered at the Lubyanka till the Americans turned it into radioactive fallout, enemies were always enemies. Even friends were sometimes enemies.
This fellow badgered Gribkov awhile longer, then gave up and left him alone. But he and his pals also had to interrogate the rest of the crew. They took their time about it. Boris didn’t ask if anyone told them more than he had. The less you asked, the less you could get in trouble for later.
He got questioned again two days after the session with the MGB man. The fellow who grilled him this time wore the uniform of a Red Army major. Gribkov rapidly began to doubt that that was what he was, or that it was all of what he was. Everyone knew about the MGB. Hardly anyone heard more than whispers about the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate. It was the military’s intelligence branch, aimed at the parts of the world that didn’t belong to the Soviet Union.
“Did anyone get to Tsederbaum?” the major asked. “Did he talk to or listen to people he shouldn’t have?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” Gribkov answered truthfully. “As far as I know, he spent just about all of his time with us and with other Soviet flyers and soldiers.”
The major grunted. He’d introduced himself as Ivan Ivanov, a name so ordinary it couldn’t be real. “Did he ever talk with foreigners? When you flew your plane in here, did he go out and find a German popsy to screw?”
“No, Comrade Major.” Again, Gribkov told the truth. “Remember, he was a Jew. He liked Germans even less than Russians do, and that’s not easy.”
Another grunt from “Ivanov.” “He was a rootless cosmopolite, you mean,” he said, which was what the Party line called Jews when they were out of favor. “Who knows what those people really think? They’re masters of mystification. It’s part of what makes them so dangerous.” Like the MGB man before him, he was working to build a case against the late Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum.
As with the MGB man before him, Gribkov didn’t want to help. “Sir, as far as I know, the only people he was dangerous to were the Soviet Union’s enemies. Thanks to him, my bombs hit America once and France twice. How many other crews have done so well?”
“Ivanov” didn’t answer, which was in itself an answer of sorts. The likely GRU man did say, “If he was such a stalwart in the service of the working class, why did he shoot himself like a plutocrat after a stock-market crash?”
“Comrade Major, the only person who could have told you that was Tsederbaum, and he isn’t here to do it any more,” Gribkov said.
“We don’t need-we don’t want-weaklings in important military positions,” “Ivanov” said fretfully. “I have to get to the bottom of this, no matter how long it takes.”
“You can’t mean we won’t fly any more missions till you do!” Boris said. There was a kick in the head for you! As far as the pilot could see, Tsederbaum had stuck the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger because he couldn’t stand the missions the Tu-4 was flying. Now, because he had, it wouldn’t fly them?
Was that irony? No, madness! And Boris knew that if he burst out laughing he’d never be able to explain it to the GRU man, any more than he would have been able to with the Chekist. People who served the Soviet Union in those ways had their sense of humor cut out of them as part of the initiation process, probably without anesthetic.
In any case, Major “Ivanov”-though his rank might be as fictitious as his name-shook his head. He wasn’t so porky as the MGB man had been, but he’d never gone hungry for long. “No, no, Comrade, no. We will furnish you with a new navigator so you can keep on carrying the action to the imperialist warmongers. But the investigation will continue until we reach the truth concerning the late Lieutenant Tsederbaum.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which here meant something like I’m stuck with whatever you tell me.
The new navigator was a round-faced first lieutenant named Yefim Vladimirovich Arzhanov. Boris put him through his paces at the navigator’s station, which lay directly behind his own but was separated from it by a bulkhead. As any pilot had to, Gribkov knew a little something about the art of navigation: enough to tell someone who also knew from a clown running a bluff. Arzhanov had a sleepy look to him, but he passed the tests the pilot gave him without needing to wake up all the way.
“You’ll do,” Gribkov said.
“Thank you, sir,” Arzhanov said. “Did you think they were trying to stick a rotten egg in your crew?”
“Of course not,” Boris answered, which, to anyone with ears to hear, meant You bet! “I just wanted to see how you run.”
“Like a stopped clock, Comrade Pilot-I’m sure to be right twice a day,” Arzhanov answered with a grin that made him look no more than fourteen.
His voice didn’t sound like Tsederbaum’s. He looked nothing like the Jew: he looked like the Russian he was. But it was a crack the dead man might have come out with. Gribkov shook his head. “I think the factory that makes navigators stamps them out crazy.”
“That’s me, sir. Just another spare part, at your service.” Yefim Arzhanov came to attention, clacked his heels together, and saluted as if he were flying for Austria-Hungary in what was now the big war before last.
“You’ll do, all right,” Gribkov said. “Just what you’ll do, I’m afraid to ask, but we’ll all find out, won’t we?”
The first thing Arzhanov did for the Tu-4 was guide the heavy bomber back to an airfield outside of Prague. As the dry run had given Boris confidence he would, he handled the short flight with unflustered competence.
Just getting away from the place where Leonid Tsederbaum decided the weight he carried was too much for his narrow shoulders came as a relief. Now they could get on with the war.
–
It was the middle of the night, moonless, cloudy, with spatters of warm July drizzle coming down every so often. It was dark as the inside of a concentration camp guard’s heart, except when guns and rocket launchers going off lit the clouds’ underside with brief, red, hellish glows.
It was, in other words, the perfect time for Gustav Hozzel to pull a sneak. He crawled through the shattered streets of Wesel, away from the blocks on the west side of town that the Germans and Americans still held and toward the Red Army’s positions. He didn’t tell his friends where he was going. He most especially didn’t tell his company CO. Max and Rolf would have tried to talk him out of it. Captain Nowak would have ordered him not to try such a harebrained stunt. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
A snake wouldn’t have lifted any higher off the ground than he did. He could feel the buttons on his tunic front scraping the asphalt as he wriggled along. The humid air stank of smoke-most of it the nasty, toxic kind that came from burnt paint and motor oil and fuel-and of death. Except during the coldest stretches of Russian winter, that spoiled-meat reek walked hand-in-hand with war.
More rain dripped from the heavens. That was good, and it was bad. The Ivans would have a harder time spotting him. But he might not hear or see approaching trouble till it arrived. Every few meters, he paused to look and listen before moving on. He wasn’t in a hurry. He just wanted to get back.
He had a bayonet in his right hand, a wire-cutter in his left. He hadn’t brought his PPSh. Firing it would be nothing but a kind of suicide. He’d scream to the whole world, or all of it that mattered, Here I am! Kill me!
The really scary thing was, he’d done worse sneaks than this. That one through the snow in southern Poland during the last winter of the old war…He’d come back with a fifteen-kilo ham, enough to let him and his buddies gorge for a couple of days instead of starving. He’d been a hero in his section-till the Russian steamroller started rolling again, anyhow.