When he saw the swelling, glowing cloud in the sky above Wesel a few kilometers behind him, he realized his imagined 155 was like a fleabite alongside a great white shark.
“I can’t see! Mother of God help me, I can’t see!” That was Andras Orban, bawling like a baby-and who could blame him? He must not have covered his eyes as fast or as well as Istvan had. Istvan still couldn’t see very well himself, but his eyes did work after a fashion.
He said so, adding, “Hang on, Andras. Pour water on them-that may help a little. Give it some time. With luck, it’ll get better. My eyes are.”
“Up your ass, you fucking kike!” Andras shrieked. “Don’t you understand? I’m blind!”
“Good job, Szolovits. Do what you can.” Sergeant Gergely raised his voice: “All you shithouse clowns who aren’t too bad off, help the poor pussies who are.” His laugh was harsh as a file. It still astonished Istvan till the noncom went on, “Well, now we know why the Americans didn’t hit back harder, don’t we?”
That hadn’t occurred to Istvan. He wanted to admire anyone who could think straight at a time like this. Instead, he found himself wondering-and not for the first time-whether Gergely was human at all.
His face still hurt. “Anyone have any burn ointment?” he called. A moment later, half a dozen other voices echoed the question.
Istvan wondered how radioactive the air he breathed was. That, he might actually be able to do something about. He had a gas mask in a metal case hung from his belt, in case the Yanks threw poison around. A lot of the men in his company had “lost” their masks, but he still carried his.
He put it on. That hurt worse, enough to make him grind his teeth and swear. The air he drew in tasted of rubber. He didn’t know whether the charcoal canisters could filter out the invisible but deadly atoms. He didn’t see how using the mask could leave him any worse off, though.
Somebody clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a smart fucking Jew!” Sergeant Gergely said. He’d kept his gas mask, too. He would have. Now he donned it, fumbling less than Istvan had. Once it was in place, he yelled for others to follow his lead.
Istvan did what he could for injured men. In the face of what had happened, it seemed pointless. But you had to try. If you didn’t do much good, it was still better than nothing. Wasn’t it?
Up ahead-off to the west-American 105s opened fire. We’ll take care of whatever the A-bomb missed, they seemed to be saying. Fresh screams rang out as the shells burst among the Hungarians. Yes, those damned guns were on the job.
“We will fall back!” a Magyar officer shouted. “We can’t stay where we are, not when we’re stuck between this and-that.” That could only be the still rising, still fading dust cloud that had leveled Wesel-and Lord only know how many Soviet troops in or moving through the town. The officer didn’t say stuck between the Devil and the deep blue sea, but Istvan guessed he would have if only he’d thought of it.
No one complained about falling back. Maybe the Russians would have, but they’d got hit harder than the Hungarians had. Yet the retreat soon swung south. Moving due east, the shortest route, would have taken them straight back through Wesel, and Wesel…wasn’t there any more. The farther east they went, the more smashed-up the country through which they were traveling looked-which, considering that they were marching closer and closer to the spot where the A-bomb went off, was hardly a surprise.
How much radiation were they picking up as they marched? Istvan had no idea. He would have bet the men leading the retreat didn’t, either. He wondered if radiation even crossed their minds. His flash burn hurt worse-he knew that.
He stumbled along with his head down, trying not to trip over whatever wreckage lay right under his feet. It was a black, moonless night. The glass eyepieces on his gas mask were none too clean. They also tended to steam up as he began sweating.
Here and there, people cried out in German and in Russian. He couldn’t, and didn’t much want to, see what had happened to Wesel. All he wanted to do was get away, to escape to a country where things like this never happened.
If there was such a country, anywhere on earth.
“I wonder how many of those bombs the Yankees dropped.” The voice behind that pig-snouted mask could belong only to Sergeant Gergely. “I wonder how many healthy Russian soldiers are left around here.”
Istvan nodded to himself. Those were interesting questions, weren’t they?
–
Konstantin Morozov shoveled shchi and kasha from his mess kit into his chowlock. The cabbage soup was better than usual. The animal that had got chopped up and boiled in it had died recently, and was still pretty fresh. Konstantin suspected the animal was a horse, not, say, a cow or a sheep, but he knew better than to get picky about a field kitchen’s shchi.
Hell, finding the field kitchen was a stroke of luck. Finding it next to a Red Army supply dump was a double stroke of luck. They could get bombed up and fill the T-54’s thirsty tank with diesel fuel. They could, and Morozov intended to.
He nodded to Juris Eigims, who was also feeding his face as fast as he could. “I hope we can get topped up all the way,” he said.
“It would be nice, da.” The gunner’s accent turned the most ordinary thing he said into music. After swallowing, he went on, “You go into action light on ammo and fuel, sooner or later you end up paying for it.”
“Usually sooner,” Konstantin agreed. When it came to fighting, Eigims was fine. The Balt wanted to live, which meant he didn’t try to undercut his tank commander while his neck was on the line.
“For now, we’re driving the fucking imperialists hard,” Vladislav Kalyakin said. His accent made Konstantin think of peasant dances and foolishness like that. Byelorussians were hard for Great Russians to take seriously. You didn’t even have to keep an eye on them, the way you did with Ukrainians. They were just there to use, like a handy pair of pliers.
“About time,” Morozov said. “We should have got to the Atlantic by now, not just to the other side of Germany. Things were different the last time around, I’ll tell you that.”
Kalyakin, Eigims, and Vazgen Sarkisyan all looked at one another. They did it in a way Konstantin wasn’t supposed to catch, but he did, even if none of them was dumb enough to say anything. He could read their minds. They were thinking something like You tell ’em, Grandpa.
They hadn’t fought their way through the Great Patriotic War. They didn’t know what that war was like, not firsthand. That had been a fight where the only rule for both sides was to kill the other guy before he killed you. It had been that way from the start. When Konstantin was a new, green loader, the handful of veterans who’d been in it from the start told stories that showed it was always that way, right from the second the Nazis swarmed over the border. Hardly any of those guys lived to see the Hammer and Sickle flying over the Reichstag in Berlin.
To Konstantin the kid, those old sweats who’d worn the uniform on 22 June 1941 had seemed ancient by 1944. Now it was his turn to be a relic of bygone days. How had that boot ended up on the other foot? He didn’t feel any older…except when he did.
“We’ll just keep hitting them till they finally fold up and fall over,” he said, in lieu of calling the youngsters he commanded a bunch of pussies. “With any luck, we’ll be in Holland tomorrow.”
“We luck has.” No, Sarkisyan didn’t speak much Russian. Using what he had, he went on, “We shells gets. We gasoline gets, too.”
“This tank uses diesel, not gasoline, you dumb blackass,” Eigims said. Konstantin wouldn’t have wanted to call the squat, burly loader that. Juris was taller than Sarkisyan, but a lot skinnier. But the Armenian only laughed, so Eigims must have found the right tone of voice.