“Sorry to hear it,” Ihor said. To him, the city’s name was Kharkiv. He kept quiet about that. Ukrainians learned Russian whether they wanted to or not. It didn’t work the other way around.
Lieutenant Smushkevich came over to the fire to see what they were up to. When the company commander saw them doing something useful, he nodded and smiled. “Good job, boys,” he said, though he was younger than either of them. “Glad to see you’ll be ready. We’re going to pound the crap out of Rheine an hour before sunup, and then we’re going in and taking it away from the imperialists.”
“Comrade Lieutenant, I serve the Soviet Union!” Karsavin said. Ihor’s head bobbed up and down to show he did, too. He would have come out with it if the other veteran hadn’t beaten him to the punch.
“Ochen khorosho,” Smushkevich said. How nervous was he? This might well be his first time under fire. He didn’t talk about himself, though. Instead, he went on, “This isn’t a brand-new dance for either one of you, is it?”
“No, Comrade Lieutenant.” This time, Ihor spoke for them both.
“All right. Try to keep an eye on the new kids, will you? Don’t let them be too stupid. They’re our seed corn. We don’t want to throw them into the grinder if we can help it.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Ihor got to say it, too. What the lieutenant meant was Try not to let them get killed because they have no idea what they’re doing. A veteran could do a little of that, but not a whole lot. If you held a rookie’s hand for him, you were liable to turn into a casualty yourself. Ihor had seen enough war to have a pragmatic attitude about it. He didn’t want to get killed or maimed. If somebody else did, especially somebody he didn’t know well or care about, that was the other guy’s worry.
“Good luck to both of you,” the lieutenant said. “I’ll see you in Rheine after we take it.” If he was nervous, he made a good stab at not showing it. With a nod, he went off to talk with some more of his men.
Ihor rolled himself in a blanket and tried to sleep. He got more than he expected, less than he hoped for: about par for the course. The old fear was back. Will I still be in one piece this time tomorrow? How hard would the Yankees fight?
He was dozing when the Soviet artillery started up in earnest. The thunder from all those guns bounced him awake. He grabbed the PPD. “Luck,” he told Dmitri Karsavin, who was also unrolling himself. Then he hunted up Misha Grinovsky. The youngster who wouldn’t be a pipefitter just yet was smoking a cigarette in quick, nervous drags. Ihor set a hand on his shoulder. “Stick close to me, kid. It’s like anything else. As soon as you’ve done it once, you’ll know how forever.”
“I sure hope so.” Grinovsky threw down the butt and lit a new smoke.
Before Ihor could offer any consolation-and before he had to start lying-Lieutenant Smushkevich blew a whistle. “Forward!” he shouted. “Forward for the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union and for our glorious leader, the great Comrade Stalin!”
Everybody who heard him cheered his head off. When someone used Stalin’s name that way, what else could you do? Somebody would report you for keeping quiet. If the Americans didn’t get you after that, the MGB damn well would.
Ihor didn’t know how many men trotted forward with him. A couple of divisions’ worth, anyway. Tanks went ahead with the foot soldiers, new T-54s and beat-up T-34/85s pulled from storage alongside them. Against a modern American or English tank, the Great Patriotic War’s workhorse was a deathtrap. Till it ran into one of those, though, it could smash up a lot of enemy infantry.
Rheine was a town of about 40,000. It lay in a valley between two low ranges of hills. The Americans had guns in the hills to the west. Ihor could see them winking in the distance. That meant shells were on the way. Sure as hell, he heard the hateful rising shriek in the air.
“Down!” he screamed. He had his entrenching tool out and started digging himself a foxhole before the artillery rounds began to burst. He saw that Karsavin hit the dirt with a veteran’s speed, too.
Misha Grinovsky…didn’t. He stayed on his feet a couple of fatal seconds too long. Flying fragments spun him around and tore him apart. What was left lay twitching a few meters from Ihor. He was dead; he just might not have figured it out yet. Once you’d done it once, you were fine. Too many, though, never made it past the first time. So much for one grain of seed corn.
A church steeple more than a hundred meters high dominated Rheine’s skyline. The Soviet shelling hadn’t toppled it. The American artillery fire was so accurate, Ihor would have bet a Yank spotter lurked up there. He wasn’t the only one who thought so. Shturmoviks roared in and rocketed the steeple. The Red Army men cheered when it tumbled down.
Ihor ran forward, yelling to hold fear at bay. Machine-gun and rifle rounds cracked near him, but none bit. He got into the outskirts of town. Something in olive drab moved behind a fence. He fired a quick burst. The something went down. You had to be careful with the PPD. On full auto, it pulled up and to the right even worse than the PPSh.
The Yanks fought street by street, house by house. They didn’t know all the tricks, the way the Fritzes had. But they were brave, and they had a lot of firepower backing them. The Red Army had to spend lives to clear them out. Spend lives it did. By afternoon, the hammer and sickle floated over Rheine.
–
For the first time in his life, Vasili Yasevich found himself among people who all looked like him. No one in the little town of Smidovich stared at him because he didn’t have golden skin, black hair, high cheekbones, and narrow eyes. No one here casually said insulting things about him assuming he couldn’t follow and wound up gaping when he came back with filthy Mandarin of his own.
He knew he should have felt like a man who’d just fallen asleep on earth and awakened in paradise. If this was paradise, though, he found himself a stranger here.
Smidovich was about as far into the back of beyond as anyone could go while still remaining in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Moscow, even Irkutsk, lay thousands of kilometers to the west. Vasili would have thought that no one in any Soviet center of power would have paid any attention to this village even before atom bombs fell on the two closest cities of any size, Khabarovsk to the east and Blagoveshchensk to the west.
The problem with Smidovich wasn’t that it was so far away from everything else. The problem was that the four thousand or so people here had all come from somewhere else-or if they hadn’t, their parents had. And they’d brought the rest of the Soviet Union with them. Inside their heads.
Vasili had lived in Harbin while it was part of Japanese puppet Manchukuo. He’d lived on there after Mao’s men took over for the Red Army soldiers who drove the Japanese out of Manchukuo and turned it back into Manchuria. He’d been careful during those bad times, and cautious, but he’d never known anything like this.
More and more, he understood why his father and mother swallowed poison rather than letting the Chekists haul them back to the USSR. Everybody here was scared all the time. That was the biggest part of what isolated him from his own neighbors.
They would say good morning. They would hire him to chop wood or to shape it into a bedframe or cabinet or to lay bricks. Every place needed people who could do those things. He was pretty good at them, even if his old man would rather have turned him into a druggist.
But behind Good morning or How much do you want for laying these bricks?, they didn’t want to talk to him. They hadn’t known him for years. They didn’t think they could trust him not to rat on them to the MGB if they said anything the least bit out of line. So they didn’t.
Something else also showed he wasn’t from these parts, something he couldn’t possibly have imagined: how fast he worked. He told a plump widow named Nina Fyodorova that he would make a bookcase for her in three days. When he lugged it to her cabin on the day he’d promised, her eyes almost bugged out of her head.