Then the women lined up so they could be counted. Across the barbed wire, the male zeks were doing the same thing. They whistled and hooted at the women, and called to them in half a dozen languages. Their guards frowned, but that was all they did. They were men, too, the bastards.
Luisa wanted nothing to do with any of them. She was filthy, her hair matted with sweat. She could smell how she stank. They were just as grimy and smelly. How did they think anyone would be interested in them? How? They were men, the bastards.
All Luisa wanted was for the count to go smoothly and for the cooks to have turned out something almost worth eating. That was what her horizons had narrowed to, that and the chance for sleep Sleep! She couldn’t imagine a word more delicious, in German or in Russian.
–
Brigadier Yulian Olminsky glowered at Boris Gribkov. His fierce black eyebrows gave him a good glower in spite of his skinny face; he looked like something that ought to live in a cave under a bridge. Gribkov didn’t much care. He was past being intimidated.
After all, what could Olminsky do to him? Leave him here to rot? He was already rotting. Send him and his crew out in the Tu-4 on a suicide mission? The way things worked these days, almost any mission a heavy bomber flew could turn suicidal, but at least they’d be doing what the Soviet Union had trained them to do. Feed him to the MGB? That was just another suicide mission.
Olminsky scowled harder when he saw Boris wasn’t turning to gelatin. “Well?” he rumbled.
“Well, what, Comrade Brigadier?” Gribkov asked. No, he really didn’t care what happened to him next. That gave him an odd edge over the base commandant. A bully who didn’t scare you wasn’t a bully any more.
“Are you and your men loyal to the Soviet Union and to the revolution of the proletariat?” Olminsky demanded.
“Comrade Brigadier, I’ve been telling you at the top of my lungs that we are ever since we got here,” Boris answered. “If you and the Chekists don’t choose to believe me, how is that any sweat off my nuts?”
The senior officer turned the color of borscht. “What the devil makes you think you can talk to me like that?”
“My men have delivered three A-bombs, sir. We’ve flown conventional missions, too,” Gribkov said. “And what thanks did we get for it? We got stuck on the back shelf like a sack of kasha your granny forgot about.”
“I can have you court-martialed for your big mouth, you know, court-martialed or just put away for real.”
“Yes, sir. But next to flying the Tu-4, a court-martial is a stroll through the grass,” Gribkov replied. “If you want to kill us off, at least let us go after the Americans. Then we can go out trying to help the rodina.”
“All right,” Olminsky said heavily. “All right. So you’re ready to deliver the mail, are you?”
“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Brigadier. I’ve always served the Soviet Union,” Boris said. “What is our next assignment?”
“You have been cleared by the security services to fly against Antwerp,” the base commandant told him. “The Americans and the English are shipping men and tanks and shit into Europe through there like they’re falling out of the Devil’s asshole.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said one more time. If relief was in his voice, it was also in his heart. He’d feared Olminsky would order his Tu-4 to attack London. Even if they made it there and came back safely after ripping out the heart of England, he didn’t know that he wanted two of the world’s great capitals on his conscience. His grain was coarser than poor Leonid Tsederbaum’s had been, but there were limits to everything.
“All right,” Yulian Olminsky repeated. “This will be a low-level flight, over the sea as much of the way as you can. Fly so close to the water, the radar will have trouble telling your plane from the waves.”
“We don’t climb to deliver the bomb? Same kind of flight path as Paris?”
“That’s right. There’ll be a short delay on the fuse to let you get clear. More fallout that way, but it can’t be helped. The enemy won’t let you climb to eleven thousand meters to drop. We don’t let them get away with that shit any more, either.”
“I understand, sir,” Gribkov said. “The whole crew will be glad to get airborne again. Only…” His voice trailed off as he visualized a map. “We can’t stay over water the whole route. Denmark’s in the way, and it’s not on our side.”
“It’s not doing much to help the enemy, either.” Olminsky gestured dismissively. “Just zoom across the peninsula. For a plane with the Tu-4’s performance, not even ten minutes from east to west.”
Just zoom across the peninsula. Yulian Olminsky made it sound easy. Making missions sound easy was one of the things base commandants were for. True, Denmark wasn’t throwing divisions into the fight in Germany. But there were U.S. fighter bases and U.S. radar stations in the country.
“We’ll have a better chance if the fighter-bombers hit them before we try the crossing,” Boris said.
“It will be attended to.” By the way Olminsky spoke, maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. Well, if he wanted to get a plane with an A-bomb in its belly shot down, that was his problem. And the crew’s.
Most of the men were eager to get back into action. “About time people quit treating us like we’ve got dogshit on our shoes,” Vladimir Zorin said.
Yefim Arzhanov practically jumped up and down. “Comrade Pilot, I will take us to Antwerp! I will bring us home after we succeed in the mission!” the new navigator declared.
“Good. That’s good.” Gribkov did his best to sound enthusiastic, but half of his mind was figuring angles and ways and means. It might work. Of course, anything might work. If it did, it would hurt the imperialists. He could see that.
But they’d be alert, damn them. His plane would need new IFF codes to fool the Americans. He and Zorin and Gennady Gamarnik, the flight engineer, went over the Tu-4 from the bombardier’s station to the tail gunner’s to see what else it might need. The engineer found and fixed some engine trouble that might have had them all sweating if it had cropped up while they were on the way.
Darkness was their best friend. Darkness was always the bomber’s friend. They climbed into the sky after the sun went down. Boris looked right and grinned at Zorin when they did get airborne. The copilot grinned, too.
“Antwerp,” Zorin said. “It’s only Antwerp.”
“You should go on the stage. You’ve got a terrific mind-reading act there,” Boris answered. In the last war, the Germans had hung on to Antwerp tooth and toenail. After they got driven out, they clung to the Scheldt estuary weeks longer so shipping couldn’t get into or out of the port. After the Anglo-Americans pushed them back there, too, Hitler had pounded it with V-2s. He had no A-bombs to put it out of action. Had he had A-bombs, he would have used them against the USSR first. There was a scary thought.
They flew north across Czechoslovakia and East Germany to the Baltic. Running out of sea and having to cross Denmark was another scary thought. All too soon, the low, flat land loomed up ahead of them. They were still flying close enough to the deck to scrape church steeples. The roar from the four big Shvetsov radials would wake the dead for kilometers around. But no one opened up on them. The radar operator didn’t start screaming about fighters. Maybe the Soviet air raid had gone in after all. Maybe luck was still running their way.
And maybe some American at a radar screen was phoning units farther west, saying Be ready-something juicy’s heading your way! Gribkov couldn’t do anything about that…but worry.
Past the Danish peninsula. Out over the North Sea. Yefim Arzhanov told Boris to swing farther south. He obeyed, hoping Arzhanov knew what he was talking about. With Tsederbaum, he would have been sure. But Tsederbaum had chosen a longer road than this one.