“Come on, boys,” Morozov said to his crew. “Let’s see what we can do with this pile of garbage.” He’d feared this would happen as soon as he saw they’d given him a bow gunner. The T-34/85 had a machine gun at the right front of the hull and one coaxial with the cannon. The T-54 carried only the coaxial machine gun.
As soon as he climbed into the tank, the faint smell of kerosene filled his nostrils. He knew what that meant. They’d swabbed out the fighting compartment with it to get rid of the stench of death. How many crews had already bought a plot in here? Better not to wonder about that.
“Crowded in here,” Juris Eigims remarked.
“You think this is bad, you should’ve seen the first T-34, the one with the 76mm gun,” Konstantin said. “Really small turret, and the commander had to aim the gun along with everything else. The Germans could shoot three times as fast as those babies could.”
“This sight is junk, too,” the Balt said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “The one on the T-54 isn’t great, but this….How are you supposed to hit anything with it?”
“Do your best, please.” Morozov tried the intercom to the forward part of the tank and discovered it didn’t work. He only wished that surprised him more. He shouted into the speaking tube instead: “Start the motor, Demyan.”
“Right, Comrade Sergeant.” Demyan Belitsky’s voice came back brassily. The diesel farted to life, belching black smoke. Konstantin swore under his breath. If it had refused to go, he could have claimed another tank. But that would have been a T-34/85, too, unless they had something older. You couldn’t expect favors after you proposed fucking somebody’s father in the ass.
“Take us up to the regimental tank depot,” Morozov said. “They’ll tell us what to do when we get there.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Belitsky said, and put the tank in gear.
Konstantin stuck his head out of the cupola to look around. It was safe enough; they were still a good ways behind the front. The shape of the tank, so much more angular than the turtle-topped T-54, was as familiar to him as the look of an old lover’s body after he hadn’t slept with her for several years. She might have got long in the tooth, but he still understood her moods.
Whether that would do anything at all to keep him breathing was liable to be a different question.
Tank tracks had chewed up the paving on the road Belitsky was using. Most of the buildings Konstantin saw had been blown up or burned or blown up and burned. In one T-54 or another, he might well have helped to knock some of them down. Now he was going over the same ground again for another round of destruction. The Americans’ A-bombs had let the enemy retake a big chunk of western Germany.
He shuddered. He knew he still wasn’t a hundred percent himself. Somewhere not far away, someone fired a ripping burst from a PPD or a PPSh. Konstantin ducked down into the turret and closed the cupola hatch. It was cold out there, and starting to rain.
The major in charge of the tank regiment was a veteran named Kliment Todorsky. He actually seemed glad to see Morozov’s crew join his unit. “I’m using T-34s as point vehicles in my platoons,” he said. “They develop the opposition, and the T-54s behind them deal with it.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Konstantin said, because he couldn’t tell a major to go fuck his father in the ass. By develop the opposition, Todorsky meant draw enemy fire. Any enemy fire a T-34/85 drew in this day and age was all too likely to leave it a smoldering hulk, and the men inside it mangled or dead.
Had he commanded the regiment, though, he knew he would have been as ruthless. One of these tanks could still make any infantry around run. It just wasn’t up for a fight against another tank.
“We have to be quick, and we have to stay lucky,” Morozov told his men. “I went through this the last time. I was always scared of Tigers and Panthers. They could kill me easier than I could kill them. It’s the same thing now, only more so.”
They pushed on toward Paderborn. The rain came down harder, with snow mixed in. Visibility dropped to a couple of hundred meters, even though Konstantin stuck his head out of the hatch again. He wouldn’t spot trouble till it was on top of him. Then again, the T-34/85 couldn’t hurt a more modern tank at anything but point-blank range.
When trouble came, it didn’t come from an enemy tank. A man with a rocket launcher popped up from behind the corpse of a Volkswagen by the side of the road. The intercom didn’t work, dammit. Konstantin had to duck inside to scream to the bow gunner: “Ahead and a little to the right! Fire! Now!”
Ilya Goledod spat death in that direction. Konstantin popped out again, just in time to watch the enemy soldier launch his rocket. But the machine-gun rounds were enough to spoil his aim. The deadly missile flew past the T-34/85 instead of burning through its frontal armor. A moment later, Juris Eigims put an HE round into the dead VW. The guy with the bazooka tumbled away. He wouldn’t cause any more trouble. But how many more like him were still around?
–
Weed, California, was up near 3,500 feet above sea level. That wasn’t enough to make Marian Staley notice the altitude when she breathed or anything. Winters were colder and harsher than they would have been lower down, though. As soon as summer ended, she’d found out about that. She and Linda had no clothes to suit the weather.
Thick jackets. Wool watch caps. Wool socks. Long johns. Waterproof boots. She didn’t like spending the money, but she liked shivering even less.
Logging slowed down in the wintertime. It didn’t stop, but the men with the axes and saws had a harder time getting to the trees they were supposed to fell and a harder time getting them away from where they’d fallen once they did go down.
Big, snorting trucks hauled trunks secured with chains to long trailers. When the snow started falling and when rain turned to ice after hitting the ground, the trucks and trailers got chains on their tires, too.
And sometimes that helped, and sometimes it didn’t. The men who ran Shasta Lumber wanted to do as much cutting and as much hauling as they could, so they made as much money as they could. The other lumber bosses in and around the town felt the same way. If their men had accidents, that was part of the cost of producing the most board-feet possible.
It was to the men who ran the outfits, anyhow. To the ones who sawed away in the snow or drove the steep, twisting, icy roads…
Marian was typing one chilly afternoon when the front door flew open. A logger in a dark green plaid Pendleton shirt and Levi’s staggered into the office. Everyone gasped or squawked when he did-he had a bloody nose and a gash over one eye.
He seemed unaware he’d been hurt. “Tom put truck number three down a scree slope,” he gasped. “Threw me clear, so I’m okay”-he was anything but-“but he’s still back there, and he’s tore up pretty good. I made it back to the road an’ flagged down a car. Somebody call Doc Toohey to go up there and give poor Tom a hand.”
Glancing down at the list of telephone numbers she might be expected to use fairly often, Marian saw one for Dr. Christopher Toohey among them. Before she could dial it, one of the other secretaries beat her to the punch. “Yes, come here first,” she told the doctor. “Billy Hurley’s here, and he’ll show you where the accident’s at.” She hung up and nodded to the logger. “Doc’s on the way.”
“Swell,” he said, as if time had stopped in 1928.
Marian pulled tissues from the box on her desk and went over to Billy Hurley. “Here,” she said, dabbing gently at the cut. “Let me clean this up if I can. You may need stitches-I don’t know. Hold some of these to your nose, too.”
“What’re you talking about?” He sounded irritable. “I’m okay. It’s poor Tom who got crunched up.”