He wouldn’t make his buddies fat this time. He did aim to make them jealous. Back and to the side of…was it this shattered building? Yes, sure enough-the apothecary’s shop.
Gustav started to go round the corner, then froze. Somebody was already crouching over what he craved. If another man from his own side had beaten him to it, more power to the sneaky bastard.
But that wasn’t somebody from his own side. Even as he watched, the Russian soldier started to drag his countryman’s corpse back toward the part of town the Reds held securely. Silent as a hunting hawk, Gustav set down the wire-cutter and eased up into a crouch. Then he sprang on the unsuspecting Ivan’s back.
His left palm covered the enemy soldier’s mouth. His strong left arm pulled the Russian’s head back. And the bayonet still in his right hand cut the man’s throat. The Russian gurgled desperately for most of a minute. He thrashed with ebbing strength till he went limp. Gustav held that hand over his mouth for an extra little while anyway. You didn’t get to be an old soldier by taking chances you didn’t have to.
So the Ivan was beyond doubt dead when Gustav slid him to the ground. He wasn’t what the German was after. The body he’d wanted to recover was. The afternoon before, Gustav had seen that that guy’d bought a plot in spite of his AK-47. Gustav had wanted one for a long time. This was his chance to get hold of one.
Part of the stock was still wet from the blood of the Ivan he’d just disposed of. Swearing silently, he wiped his hand on his trouser leg. But it wouldn’t be the first piece he’d carried that was bloodied in the literal sense of the word.
He frisked both dead Russians, and came up with five magazines for the assault rifle. They held thirty rounds apiece. That would keep him going for a little while, anyhow. If he couldn’t get more, he’d go back to the PPSh. He wouldn’t toss it just yet. He also discovered that one of the Ivans’ canteens was full of vodka. That was worth having, too.
“Now,” he said, shaping the words but not putting any sound behind them, “let’s get the hell out of here.”
Sometimes you got careless on the way back after you pulled a stunt like this. When you did, chances were you paid for it. Gustav took even more pains on his way back to his side’s chunk of Wesel than he had on his foray into the Red Army’s part of town.
The live Russians didn’t know he’d been and gone. Neither did the German pickets. That amused and worried him at the same time. What he’d done, some enterprising Ivan could imitate.
He curled up in his blanket and shelter half and went to sleep. He’d snored through plenty worse than this on-and-off drizzle. He slept so hard, Rolf had to shake him awake once it got light. As soon as he uncocooned himself, the ex-LAH man saw his new toy. “Where’d you get that?” he demanded.
“Came in one of the cans from my last K-ration,” Gustav said, deadpan.
Rolf cussed him out in German, Russian, and what was probably Magyar. Then he calmed down. His gaze sharpened. “First one I’ve seen close up,” he said. “It looks just like a Sturmgewehr, doesn’t it? Except for the crappy wood stock, I mean. Even that banana-shaped magazine’s the same.”
Gustav had seen only a few of the German assault rifles during the last war. They were made from stamped metal and plastic: no wood at all. “You know how the Russians copy shit,” he said. “Monkey see, monkey do.” He pulled off the receiver. “Are the guts the same, too?”
Rolf bent over to examine the Soviet rifle’s working parts. He whistled softly between his teeth. “No. Not even close,” he said, his admiration grudging but real. “Our piece was a lot more complicated. This…This is about as simple as it can get and still work, looks like.”
“It does, yeah. Makes it easy to take care of, anyway. I like that,” Gustav said. The PPSh was the same way. It was far less elegant than a German Schmeisser, but much more robust. Come to think of it, you could say the same thing about the T-34 when you set it in the scales against German panzers.
“You’ve got blood on you,” Rolf remarked.
“It isn’t mine. There’d be more if God wasn’t pissing on us last night,” Gustav said.
“Ganz gut.” Rolf had heard enough to satisfy him. The only thing the Waffen-SS cared about was spilling the other guy’s blood.
Instead of eating K-rations for breakfast, they got last night’s stew reheated in a Goulaschkanone-Landser slang for a field kitchen. Barley, turnips, carrots, and bits of meat went down easy and put plenty of daub on the wattle of your ribcage.
They did if you got to finish them, anyhow. The Russians started early that morning, raining Katyushas down on the part of Wesel they hadn’t seized before Gustav had more than half-emptied his mess kit. He let the little tin basin and spoon fly any which way as he dove for the nearest muddy foxhole. Those rockets screaming in always made him want to piss his pants. The first Germans at whom the Ivans had aimed Katyushas ran like rabbits-the ones the bombardment didn’t kill, anyhow. If you wanted to flatten a square kilometer, a couple of launch racks’ worth of Katyushas were the next best thing to an A-bomb.
The Ivans didn’t have the advantage of surprise any more, though. Gustav huddled in his hole, waiting for the rockets to stop. If they didn’t kill him, he’d have to fight them. They didn’t. He did. He rapidly developed a deep affection for the Soviet assault rifle he’d killed to acquire. It beat the snot out of the PPSh.
But there were too many Russians, too many tanks. He thought he’d fallen back to the black days of 1945, when there were always too many tanks and too many Russians. He scrambled out of the foxhole to join the retreat. It was that or die.
He saw his mess tin, lying on the pavement. A fragment from a Katyusha had torn it almost in half. One more war casualty, he thought. He trotted northwest, toward the new defensive line the Germans and Amis were trying to set up.
–
“Give them the machine gun, Juris!” Konstantin Morozov shouted.
“I’m doing it, Comrade Sergeant,” Juris Eigims replied. The gunner used the weapon coaxial with the T-54’s cannon to spray the luckless enemy soldiers-Englishmen, Konstantin thought they were from the shape of their helmets-who had the bad luck to show themselves just as the tank chugged out from behind a burnt-out church.
Some of the Tommies fell over. Some ran back to the stone fence that had protected them till they came out from behind it. Others made pickup on their wounded and dead mates. The machine gun bit some of those guys, too. It didn’t care that they were brave and wanted to save their comrades. It only cared that they were there, where it could reach them.
Morozov said, “Why don’t you hit that fence with a round or two of HE? Then send in another one and smash whatever’s right in back of it.”
“Right, Comrade Sergeant.” Eigims barked an order to Vazgen Sarkisyan. The loader slammed a 100mm shell into the breech and banged it closed. The Baltic gunner fired. Inside the turret, the roar wasn’t too bad. Had he been out in the open air, Konstantin would have thought it took his head off.
Hit by fifteen kilos of speeding metal and high explosives, several meters of the stone fence abruptly ceased to be. So did a good many enemy soldiers behind those meters. The blasted bits of stone made more murderous shrapnel than anything the most fiendish shell-builder would pack into a casing.
“Want me to hit the wall again, Comrade Sergeant? We got good results from that last round.” Eigims did understand that killing enemy troops was his own best chance of staying alive. While they were in action, he didn’t go out of his way to undercut the tank commander.
Coughing on propellant fumes, Morozov nodded. “Da. Say, fifteen or twenty meters to the left of the last one.”