“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Cade didn’t want to talk about it, or even think about it, now that it was over. He’d had a balaclava under his helmet, plus a muffler wrapped around everything south of his eyes. He’d had a tunic, a sweater, and a parka. He’d had two pairs of long johns under his pants-hell when he had to take a dump-and padded, insulated boots. He’d worn mittens. He’d felt like a goddamn popsicle all the time in spite of everything.
The machine gun’s stream of bullets traversed past them again. Some of the fiery tracers looked close enough to let you reach up and light a Camel off of them. Cade understood that wasn’t a Phi Beta Kappa idea, which didn’t make it go away.
Lou Klein spat against the side of the trench. “Hell of a lot of good A-bombing those cities in Manchuria and Siberia did, huh? You can tell the Chinks’ll run out of ammo about twenty minutes from now. Boy, did we fuck the hell outa their logistics.”
Cade dug a finger into his none too pink and shell-like ear, as if at a loud noise. “Sorry, Sergeant,” he said. “My sarcasm detector went off so hard there, it damn near deafened me.”
“Heh, heh.” Klein gave that two syllables’ worth of laughter-about what it deserved. “Yeah, I was just kidding, but I was kidding on the square.”
That was pretty much the definition of sarcasm. Saying as much to the veteran noncom struck Cade as one more losing proposition. Klein was old enough to be his father. Just like Cal Curtis back in Tennessee, he assumed he knew better than Cade. That Cade outranked him made him politer than the senior Curtis about saying so, but only to a certain degree. Senior sergeants were the men who taught junior officers their trade in the field. The U.S. Army had inherited that tradition from the English. Cade didn’t know or care from whom the Tommies had lifted it.
Little by little, as he showed he had some notion of what he was doing, Lou acted more as if he was his superior after all. That still came by fits and starts, though.
Thinking out loud, Cade said, “We got some more bazooka rounds in last night, didn’t we?”
“Sure did.” Klein sounded disgusted. “Naturally, they send the fuckers up here when we ain’t seen no enemy tanks for a coupla weeks. They can-” He offered a suggestion for where the brass could stick them.
Cade didn’t think they’d fit there, even greased. But he said, “I wasn’t thinking of tanks so much. If we send out a bazooka or two after it gets good and dark, maybe we can get rid of that stinking Maxim.”
Klein didn’t answer for close to a minute. He stood there with his whiskery chin cupped in his hand, his eyes far away, weighing the scheme. Almost as slowly, he nodded. “Every once in a while, Lieutenant, you’re damn near worth what they pay you, huh?”
“You say the sweetest things.” Cade hesitated, then went on, “I’ll take one of the tubes myself. I know more about getting through wire than most of the guys.”
“You don’t gotta do that, sir,” Klein said quickly.
“It’ll give us a better chance to take out the machine gun,” Cade said with a shrug. “That’s good for everybody, me included.” Klein’s lips moved silently. Cade thought he said stupid kid, but wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to become sure badly enough to ask.
He and the other guy with a launcher, a PFC named Frank Sanderson, loaded their rockets before they set out on the craw across no-man’s-land. “Some fun, huh, sir?” Sanderson said.
“Now that you mention it, no.” Cade was wishing he’d listened to Sergeant Klein. He’d grabbed the bull by the horns. Now he had to wrestle it down.
The bazooka tube and rocket were awkward slung across his back. If something snagged the trigger…In that case, he’d have just enough time to be embarrassed before the Red Chinese killed him.
A couple of hundred yards to the left, an American machine gun started shooting at the enemy’s trenches-though not in the direction from which Cade and Sanderson were coming. As Cade had hoped, the Chinks returned fire. The Maxim’s tracers and muzzle flashes told him exactly where it lurked.
He snipped one strand of barbed wire after another. He heard every clip and every twang, but the enemy soldiers didn’t. The machine-gun duel drowned out softer sounds. His real worry was that the Red Chinese would send out their own patrol and find him. That wouldn’t be so real hot.
He worked his way to within a couple of hundred yards of the Maxim, Sanderson literally on his heels. He motioned for the PFC to come up alongside him. “I’ll go left now,” he whispered. “You go straight. Get in as close as you can. When I fire, you do the same. Then we get the hell out of here.”
“I like that part, Lieutenant,” Sanderson whispered back.
Cade slithered in to just over a hundred yards from the gun. Then he peered down the bazooka’s rudimentary sight and pulled the trigger. Whoosh! Roar! As the rocket zoomed away, a wire mesh screen at the front of the launch tube kept its flames from scorching his face.
Sanderson’s rocket went off no more than three seconds after his, from almost as close. The Maxim gun, which had been barking away, suddenly shut up. Cade discarded the launcher and scurried off toward the American trenches. He stayed as low to the ground as he could.
More than a little to his surprise, he made it. So did Sanderson. None of what the Red Chinese threw at them struck home. And now they wouldn’t need to worry about that Maxim…till the bastards on the other side made a nest for a new one.
–
Ihor Shevchenko methodically shoved 7.62mm pistol rounds into his PPD’s snail drum. The big magazine was stamped with a 71 to let you know the most cartridges you could fit in there. Whoever designed that into it was smart-but maybe not smart enough. Some of the dumb bastards the Red Army was sucking into its insatiable maw couldn’t even read the number.
Artillery shells flew by overhead with freight-train noises. Those were Soviet 155s, heading for the German town of Rheine. The Dutch border was only a few kilometers to the west.
Turning to one of the other guys topping up the tank on his submachine gun, Ihor said, “Crazy how you still know what kind of gun it is just by the sound of the ammo in the air.”
Dmitri Karsavin nodded. “It is, yeah.” Like Ihor, he’d been through the mill the last time around. His limp was worse than the Ukrainian’s, in fact. He went on, “It only works for our pieces, though. The Americans’ guns don’t sound the same as the Hitlerites’ did.”
“You’re right about that.” Ihor nodded. “I didn’t hear the Americans’ guns the last time. A fragment took a chunk out of my leg when we were in western Poland, getting ready to drive on into Germany.”
“Sounds a lot like my story,” the other retread said. “I got mine in Budapest. A rocket blew up too close to me and bit me in the ass. You see me naked, I’ve only got half my right buttock.”
“No offense, buddy, but I don’t want to see you naked. You don’t do a fucking thing for me,” Ihor said. But no wonder Karsavin limped.
“Well, we’re even, believe me. It’s not like I’m perfect, but I ain’t no fruit.” Karsavin hadn’t shaved lately. He didn’t smell good. His uniform could have used a wash. He looked a lot like Ihor, in other words, even if his stubble was darker than the Ukrainian’s.
“I never in a million years figured I’d have to do this again.” As Ihor spoke, he went on filling the snail drum. He didn’t need to pay much attention to his fingers; they knew what to do on their own. “Once was plenty to last me the rest of my days.”
“You do what they make you do, that’s all.” Dmitri Karsavin spoke with a peasant fatalism Russians and Ukrainians shared. “My father fought against the Kaiser for the Tsar. He fought against the Whites for Lenin. When the Nazis jumped us, he fought them for Stalin. And they killed him outside of Kharkov in 1943.”