“Hold on one moment, Comrade Pilot,” Lieutenant Ikramov said. Boris listened to him talk with the other Tu-4’s radio operator for a few seconds. Then Ikramov came back to him: “Go ahead, sir.”
“Milch Cow, this is Calf One. Milch Cow, this is Calf One. Do you read me, Milch Cow?” Gribkov said.
“Calf One, this is Milch Cow. Reading you loud and clear. How do you read me, Calf One?” The new voice in Boris’ earphones was calm and unflustered. The other pilot made him think he was dealing with someone experienced, someone who wouldn’t panic if anything unexpected happened.
“Also reading you loud and clear, Milch Cow,” Gribkov said. “Do you have us visually? We are climbing up to take our position.”
“I see you, yes,” the other pilot replied. “I will continue to cruise at 330-I say again, three-three-oh-kilometers an hour.”
“I understand. As I approach, I will also slow to 330-I say again, three-three-oh.”
“I hear you, Calf One,” Milch Cow’s pilot said. “We’ll talk some more when you get into position. Out for now.”
“Out,” Boris echoed.
Up he climbed, and took his place behind the milch cow. The other bomber’s pilot came back on the radio: “Deploy your cable. I am deploying ours.”
“Deploy the cable,” Gribkov told Lev Vaksman.
“I am deploying the cable, Comrade Pilot,” the engineer replied.
That other cable descended from the milch cow. It met the one from Gribkov’s calf, which guided the nozzle at the end to a fitting at the end of Gribkov’s Tu-4’s right wing. From his station on the starboard side of the fuselage, Vaksman could see when contact was made.
“We have a join, sir!” he said, his voice rising in excitement.
“Milch Cow, this is Calf One. We have a join.” Boris relayed the news.
“I see it, Calf One. I was waiting for you to confirm,” Milch Cow’s pilot said. “Shall I commence fueling?”
“Yes, Milch Cow. Commence fueling.” Gribkov went through all the repetition without the least fuss. Everything had to be right.
The Soviet Union had started working on in-flight refueling as early as 1948. It was the obvious way to extend the Tu-4’s range and let the heavy bomber hit targets it couldn’t reach with what it carried in its own tanks. Till the war started, not much progress got made. Now…Now they had to learn how to do it right. American planes could reach most of the important places within the USSR. Without in-flight refueling, Soviet bombers couldn’t do the same to the USA. America’s heavily populated, highly productive East had been safe, shielded by distance.
Just because it had been, though, didn’t mean it would stay that way.
“I see the fuel gauge moving,” Gribkov said to Vaksman. “We are taking in fuel?”
“Comrade Pilot, that’s what the instruments show. This is really something, isn’t it?” the engineer said. “It’s like long-distance screwing.”
One more Zhid with a half-baked sense of humor, Boris thought. But the milch cow’s pilot guffawed when he passed along the comment. “I’ve got a long dick, all right,” the man said.
Boris’ bomber took on several hundred liters of fuel in fifteen minutes. The milch cow had a pump to speed things along. Early Soviet efforts at in-flight refueling had used gravity feed. It worked well enough to show the brass that the idea was possible, not well enough to make the possible practical. The pump made an enormous difference.
As the milch cow refueled the other Tu-4, the pilot flew in a wide circle. Part of the practice session was to get Boris used to keeping station with the milch cow. Bombers didn’t usually fly in such close formation, for obvious reasons. It turned out not to be difficult, only to require constant close attention. The milch cow’s pilot was as smooth as his voice and manner suggested he might be. He made no sudden, jerky, or unlooked-for maneuvers.
When the fueling was done, he said, “Release the nozzle.”
“I am releasing the nozzle,” Lev Vaksman replied, and then, a moment later, “The nozzle is released. I say again, the nozzle is released.”
“Thank you. I see that the nozzle is released.” The milch cow’s pilot, or more likely his engineer, reeled in the refueling cable. Vaksman did the same with the catching cable. The two big planes separated. A different pilot would come up to have a go with the milch cow. Boris’ next chance would come tomorrow afternoon.
–
A lieutenant handed Ihor Shevchenko new shoulder boards. Instead of being plain khaki like the ones on his tunic now, these had a dull-red horizontal stripe. “Congratulations, Shevchenko! You’re a corporal now. You’ve done well, and we’ve noticed,” he said, speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent not much different from Ihor’s own.
Ihor saluted stiffly. “Thank you, Lieutenant Kosior, sir! I serve the Soviet Union!”
“We all serve the Soviet Union, and the great Stalin,” Stanislav Kosior replied. He might come from the Ukraine, but he talked like the New Soviet Man you always heard about on the radio but hardly ever met. “We will drive back the forces of reaction, imperialism, and capitalism. True Communism will come to the entire world, I expect even in our lifetimes. It will be wonderful!”
“It will, Comrade Lieutenant!” Ihor sounded as enthusiastic as he could. He knew how to mask what went through his head. You didn’t dare let people like this know you thought they’d been putting hashish in their papirosi. They’d make you sorry if you slipped like that.
“Carry on, then, Corporal, and congratulations again!” Kosior looked like a New Soviet Man, too. He kept himself clean and well groomed, even in the field during winter. He was taller and slimmer and handsomer than most. If you wanted to get rude about it, he looked the way a Russian who’d turned halfway into a German might.
No matter what he looked like, he wasn’t so smart as he thought he was. Had he been, he wouldn’t have promoted a man who’d just scragged a sergeant from his own side. If I’d known it would get me promoted, I’d’ve started shooting the bastards a long time ago, Ihor thought. He remembered plenty of noncoms and junior officers from the Great Patriotic War whom nobody would have missed.
The promotion also convinced him none of his squadmates had seen him shoot Sergeant Prishvin. Or, if someone had, he also thought the son of a bitch had it coming. That would do.
Ihor unbuttoned his plain shoulder boards and replaced them with the striped ones. He was still a corporal even if he didn’t; he’d seen majors wearing a second lieutenant’s rank markings because no one had bothered to issue them new ones. In the fight against the Nazis, things often got too busy to worry about details like that.
Now he wouldn’t have to chop firewood or fill canteens at a stream or dig latrine trenches any more-well, not so much, anyhow. The Russian word for corporal, yefreitor, was borrowed from the German Gefreiter, a junior noncom who was freed from fatigue duties.
One of the other veterans in Ihor’s section, Pyotr Boky, clapped a hand to his forehead when he saw the new shoulder boards. “They promoted you?” he exclaimed in mock, or maybe not so very mock, horror. “Christ have mercy! The Red Army’s going to pot!”
“Fuck you, too, Petya, right up the poop chute,” Ihor answered sweetly. “I can order you out on forward guard duty for the next hundred years.”
“Sure you can, if you’re the right kind of prick,” Pyotr said. “Everybody knows you’re a prick, yeah, but I thought you were a different kind of prick.”
They jawed back and forth, neither man taking any of it seriously. It was the kind of thing soldiers did when there was a lull in the fighting. Ihor didn’t think the lull would last long. Not only had the Red Army failed to break into Paderborn, the enemy had pushed several kilometers east of the city. Something had to give. Either the Americans were going to try to move up again or his own side would mount another drive to the west.