He and Gergely hotfooted it up to that landing and peered out through a glassless square that had been a window. An American self-propelled gun clanked around the corner. It carried a 105mm gun and a couple of machine guns. It didn’t have as much armor as a tank, but it was fine for knocking down buildings or shooting up soldiers and trucks it caught in the open.
Or it would have been. It never got the chance. Istvan had seen less than Sergeant Gergely, but he knew armor inside a built-up area was hideously vulnerable. Somebody in a block of flats across the street had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. A roar, a blast of fire, and that self-propelled gun turned into a blazing oven to cook its crew. It burned with savage ferocity. Flames and black, greasy smoke rose from the murdered machine.
“Stupid cocksuckers,” Gergely said. “You send one of those babies up a street without an infantry screen, you’re asking for something like that. It’s blocked the road so nothing else can get through, too.”
“They must have thought we’d thrown in the sponge,” Istvan said. “After all, we’re only Hungarians, right?”
The Americans would think he was a Hungarian. They’d kill him if they could because they thought he was a Hungarian. But how about Sergeant Gergely? What did he think? Somehow, the answer mattered very much to Istvan.
If Gergely had laughed and said something like You, a Hungarian? You’re a Hungarian like I shit angels, Istvan might have shot him right there. But the sergeant just grunted and replied, “Yeah, well, in the last war the Russians got that kind of surprise a time or three, too. You have any smokes?” Istvan gave him a cigarette and lit one himself, feeling better about his small piece of the world.
–
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. A captain Ihor Shevchenko’d served under during the Great Patriotic War used to say that all the time. He’d said it all the time till a German bouncing mine blew off his balls, anyhow. If he still said it, he said it soprano.
Which might not have kept the Chekists from sucking him back into the Red Army. They might figure a guy who’d had balls once upon a time still did whether that was literally true or not. Or, if he helped them make their quota, they might not even care.
What brought the thought back to Ihor’s mind now was the AK-47 he carried through northwestern Germany. As long as he had it, he could use it to get whatever he wanted. The front seemed to have broken down. No one gave him any orders after he got kicked out of the aid station. The docs there expected him to hook up with his old regiment again.
And so he would have, had he thought anything was left of it. But it had been in the trenches the Americans atom-bombed. He was one of the few people who’d watched two A-bombs delivered in anger go off and was still around to talk about it. A dubious distinction, yeah, but his own.
Only he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to rejoin the war, either. He went where he pleased. The A-bomb seemed to have blown up the MGB pukes behind the line, one of the few good things he could say about it. Nobody Soviet tried to dragoon him into the trenches.
And nobody German wanted to argue with him, not when he had Sergeant Kalashnikov’s finest creation as a persuader. Using it and the bits of Deutsch he remembered from the last war, he had no trouble getting all the food and booze he wanted. Who would argue with an assault rifle?
He and the men he’d joined up with weren’t the only Red Army soldiers roaming the countryside on their own. Soviet military discipline was stern, but not always stern enough to stand up to a good dose of radiation. Plenty of men who hadn’t wanted to be in Germany to begin with had had all the war they wanted, thank you very much.
Loosely banded together as they were, they could pull off bigger heists than one man could on his own. Then they’d drink themselves into a stupor. Schnapps worked as well as vodka for that.
A corporal named Feofan hoisted a bottle and said, “Pretty soon the Americans will push forward and butcher all of us like hogs.” He laughed till tears ran down his dirty face. He was very drunk.
Well, so was Ihor. So were all of them. And they all laughed. Ihor said, “We lived through the atom bomb. You think ordinary soldiers can do for the likes of us?”
“No fucking way!” Three Russians said the same thing at the same time. Or Ihor thought so. He was already drunk enough to be seeing double. Why shouldn’t he be drunk enough to be hearing triple? That was the last thing he remembered before passing out.
He woke up the next morning feeling exactly like death. He lay under a blanket out in the open under chilly drizzle. And one thing about schnapps: it hurt you worse than vodka did. The only medicine Ihor could think of that might dent his jimjams was the hair of the wolfpack that had its teeth in him. Not all the bottles lying around the sodden soldiers could be empty…could they? Fate wouldn’t be so cruel!
He found one with some life in it and swigged like a man in the desert who’d stumbled across an oasis. His stomach didn’t like the dose, but the rest of him did.
The others were no happier as they came back to consciousness. They ran out of restorative before they ran out of men who needed it. Then, weapons at the ready, they descended on the nearest village to take more. Ihor feared his head would fall off if he had to fire his AK-47, but the Germans didn’t know that.
What the Germans hereabouts did know was that Russians had done horrible things to their countrymen farther east. (Some were bound to know those horrible things were in revenge for what the Germans had done in the USSR, but that made them more nervous, not less.) When grimy, nasty Red Army men with assault rifles and machine pistols descended on them, they didn’t do anything to try to provoke the invaders.
Schnapps? Food? Cigarettes? They were happy to cough those up, as long as the Russians didn’t start shooting their men and gang-raping their women. Nothing could have stopped the Red Army soldiers from doing that, but they didn’t. They’d get in trouble for it, either from their own officers if the USSR pulled itself together or from the enemy if their own country couldn’t. However much he wanted to, Ihor couldn’t get drunk enough to forget about the enemy.
Artillery fire said the Americans were moving forward not far south. The only reason Ihor could find that they weren’t moving forward here, too, was that this wasn’t the main axis of their advance. They’d push hard where they wanted to, and clean up backwaters later.
Backwaters like this one.
It wasn’t till two days later that an American jeep nosed down the road to see what was going on. Like many jeeps, this one carried a pintle-mounted heavy machine gun: a lot of firepower for such a little vehicle.
The powerful machine gun did the Yankees in the jeep no good at all. They were gum-chewing teenagers, conscripts who had no idea what war was about. Since their very first lesson was the cruelest one possible, they never got the chance to learn.
They had no idea any Russians were within five kilometers of them, either, when they drove into the village. Like Ihor, most of his pals had picked up their warcraft against the Fritzes the last time around. Setting ambushes was second nature to them. Guys who couldn’t learn that stuff lay in unmarked graves all up and down the western USSR, when they weren’t just bones under bushes somewhere.
Because he had the Kalashnikov, Ihor took out the man behind the machine gun with a single head shot. The range wasn’t long for him, but it would have been for somebody with a submachine gun. The driver just had time to turn in alarm toward his stricken comrade when a burst from a PPD cut him down. He didn’t die right away, so another burst finished him. The jeep rolled on till it hit a telephone pole. Then it stopped.
“Too easy!” Feofan said scornfully.
“They won’t always be that blind,” Ihor said. “We should grab the machine gun. That’s one hell of a weapon for as long as we can keep it fed.”