“Got you.” As Sarkisyan loaded another HE shell into the gun, Eigims traversed the turret. The cannon bellowed again. Another stretch of stone fence turned to deadly fragments. Another swath of Englishmen huddling behind it turned to sausage meat.
“Good shot!” Morozov said. “Now one more, through a gap.”
“You want it to burst just behind there?” the gunner asked.
“That’s right. That’s just right!” Konstantin reached down and thumped Eigims on the shoulder, a liberty he hadn’t taken till now. “Now we’ll do for the ones the first two rounds only scared.”
“Khorosho.” Juris Eigims ordered another HE shell from the loader. As soon as Sarkisyan manhandled it into place and closed the breech, the gunner fired. The cartridge case clanged on the floor of the fighting compartment. The shell burst sent bodies cartwheeling through the air, high enough so Morozov could see them above the top of the battered stone fence. Eigims glanced up at him. “Shall I send one more?”
Not without regret, Konstantin shook his head. “I don’t want to get greedy. We stay out here in the open too long, they’ll give it to us.” He spoke over the intercom to Vladislav Kalyakin, who sat all alone at the front of the T-54’s hulclass="underline" “Back us up behind the church again, Vladislav. Some people who don’t like us very much will start throwing things at us in a minute.”
“You’ve got it, Comrade Sergeant.” Gears ground as the driver put the tank into reverse. The T-54’s transmission wasn’t what anybody would call smooth. But it beat hell out of the T-34’s. In the older tank, the driver always kept a heavy mallet where he could grab it in a hurry when he needed to persuade the beast to engage the top gear.
The Americans in their fancy Pershings would laugh at that. During the Great Patriotic War, Germans in their fancy Tigers and Panthers would have laughed, too…for a while. Then the front stopped moving east and rolled west, west, inexorably west, all the way to Berlin. After a while, the fucking Fritzes started laughing out of the other side of their mouths.
Now the front was rolling west again. Pretty soon, the Americans-and the English, and the French, and the Nazi retreads who fought alongside them-would be laughing out of the other side of their mouths, too.
Juris Eigims tapped Konstantin on the leg of his coveralls. When the tank commander glanced down, Eigims said, “You know what you’re doing, hey, Comrade Sergeant?”
From him, Morozov would never get higher praise. Konstantin knew it, but tried not to make too much of it. “Well, maybe a little bit,” he answered. “It’s not like I’m a virgin inside a tank, you know.”
“Captain Lapshin said that, yeah,” the gunner replied. “But some people, you put ’em in charge of something and they start thinking they’re little tin gods. You aren’t like that.”
By some people, he was bound to mean some Russians or perhaps lots of Russians. He wasn’t even wrong, as Morozov knew too well. Some Russians, perhaps lots of Russians, were like that. No doubt some Latvians and Lithuanians were, too. But in a world where there were swarms of Russians and a handful of Balts, the Latvians and Lithuanians rarely got the chance to show it off.
“Look, all I want to do is get through this mess in one piece,” Konstantin said. “We’ve got to fight. Nobody says we’ve got to be stupid while we do it.” He paused to light a papiros and suck in smoke. Then he asked, “How’s that sound to you?”
“I’ve heard things I liked worse.” Eigims paused, too, weighing his words. “As long as you’re like this, it doesn’t matter so much that I didn’t get the tank.”
The cigarette gave Konstantin the excuse to waste another few seconds before he replied, “You can swing one. You know what to do. If we stay alive, you’ll get your chance.”
“Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m not what you’d call a socially reliable element.” Eigims didn’t bother hiding his bitterness.
“In a war, being able to do the job counts for more,” Konstantin said.
“Easy for you to tell me that. You’re a Russian.”
“I’ve been in the army since halfway through the Great Patriotic War. I’m a sergeant. By the time they make me a lieutenant, I’ll be dead of old age.” Morozov had no great hankering to wear an officer’s shoulder boards. But that was beside the point he was trying to make.
Eigims grunted. Konstantin let it alone, but he was confident he had it right. If you could do the job and they didn’t blow you up, you would make sergeant and command a tank. Russian? Karelian? Armenian? Lithuanian? Uzbek? Chukchi from the far reaches of Siberia? He’d seen sergeants from all those peoples, and more besides, in the armored divisions that smashed the Hitlerites. They were still in the Red Army, too.
It wasn’t quite the same when you talked about officers. Then Slavs and Armenians and Georgians (Stalin was one, after all) had an edge on the other tribes, mostly because they’d shown themselves to be more trustworthy.
Morozov’s musing cut off when Kalyakin asked him, “Comrade Sergeant, what do you want me to do now? Stay here and wait for the enemy or for reinforcements?”
“No, no. Back it up some more. Let’s not come out at them the same way. We’ll go around to the far side. Juris, swing the turret around so you can fire as soon as you see the chance. Slap a round of AP in there for that. If we need it, we’ll need it bad.”
“I’ll do it,” Eigims said. Actually, Sarkisyan would, but it amounted to the same thing. And they did need it. The first thing Konstantin saw when they came around the other side of the church was a Centurion. But it had its main armament aimed at where he had been, not where he was.
“Fire!” he yelled as the English tank’s turret started a desperate traverse. Eigims did, and he hit with the first shot. The Centurion exploded in smoke and flame. Konstantin ordered the T-54 back behind the church again. He’d given the Tommies something to stew over, all right.
–
Somewhere-maybe off a dead Russian officer-Sergeant Gergely had found himself a big, shiny brass whistle. He wore it around his neck on a leather bootlace, and he was as happy with it as a three-year-old would have been with a toy drum. He always had liked to make noise. What sergeant didn’t?
He blew it now. It was loud and shrill. “Come on, you lugs! Get moving! It’s been a while, but now we’re starting to put the capitalist imperialist warmongers on the run!” he said, and blew it again.
Istvan Szolovits didn’t giggle. Not giggling took some effort, but he managed. During the last war, Gergely would have shouted Hitler’s slogans, and Admiral Horthy’s, and those of Ferenc Szalasi, the Magyar Fascist Hitler installed after he stopped Horthy from making a separate peace with Russia.
Now Gergely yelled what Stalin wanted him to yell. He sounded as if he meant every word of what he said, too. Szolovits was sure he’d sounded just as sincere when he bellowed Hitler’s slogans, and Horthy’s, and Szalasi’s.
And he must have sounded even more sincere when he explained to the Chekists or the Hungarian secret police how he’d been lying through his teeth when he made noises for Hitler and Horthy and Szalasi. He’d made them believe him, or give him the benefit of the doubt when there should have been no doubt.
He’d been a noncom for the Fascists. Now he was a noncom for the Communists. If the world turned on its axis yet again and Hungary found itself a satellite of the USA rather than the USSR, Istvan would have bet anything he had that Gergely’d wind up a noncom for the capitalists. Whoever was in charge needed good noncoms, and the sergeant damn well was one.
Which didn’t mean Istvan was eager to follow Gergely as the veteran loped forward. An American machine gun was stuttering dangerously up ahead. A man could get hurt if he got close, or even closer, to it.
But the Hungarians weren’t the only ones moving to the attack. They had Poles to their left and Russians to their right. The Russians, richer in equipment than their fraternal socialist brethren, had a couple of SU-100 self-propelled guns with them. Those were tank destroyers from the last war. Following the Nazis’ lead, Stalin’s designers put a 100mm gun in a non-traversing mount on a T-34 chassis with some extra frontal armor. Tanks could do more things, but guns like that were cheaper and easier to make-and when they hit, they hit hard.