When Russians had a plan, they stuck to it even if parts of it didn’t work the way they wanted. Even though the Shturmoviks hadn’t hit the Germans in Warberg as hard as they would have wanted, they followed up the air assault with a brief mortar barrage. Then the infantry came forward.
Some of the Red Army men had snow smocks and white trousers over their uniforms. Others wore khaki, and stood out against the background almost like running lumps of coal.
Regardless of whether he thought they had any chance of breaking through, Russian attacks always scared the whey out of Gustav. The Ivans advanced as if they didn’t care whether they lived or died. That probably meant they feared the secret policemen behind them more than the enemy soldiers ahead. They kept coming till they took their objective or till they all fell trying.
Sometimes they did that. Not always. They showed they were human after all at the oddest times. Anything they weren’t looking for could turn them from stoic heroes to fear-mad fugitives in seconds.
That was what happened this morning. The Germans had a well-hidden machine gun farther forward than the Ivans realized. And it wasn’t just any old machine gun. It was an MG-42, a Wehrmacht leftover that still outdid any other country’s murder mill.
The crew played it cool, too. They let the Russians hurry past them, then opened up from what was now a flank. The Red Army men started falling from bullets that seemed to come out of nowhere. And one MG-42 could put out as much fire as a company’s worth of riflemen.
Quite suddenly, the Russians weren’t running toward Warberg any more. They were running away as fast as they could, those still able to. Before he joined the Wehrmacht, Gustav had thought it wasn’t sporting to shoot a man in the back. That attitude didn’t last long on the Eastern Front. You did whatever you could to stay alive.
Dead men’s greatcoats were blots on the snow. Splashes and drizzles of scarlet seemed an artist’s embellishments…if the artist worked with pain and suffering. Gustav clicked a fresh magazine onto his AK-47. He had only a couple of more left, but he could scavenge plenty from the dead Russians.
He lit a Lucky of his own. After a deep drag, he said, “They ought to pin gongs on those machine gunners.”
“Amen!” Max agreed.
“You bet.” Rolf nodded, too. “Hit the Ivans from the side when they don’t expect it and it’s two to one they go to pieces. They’re as sensitive about their flanks as a virgin.”
“They aren’t virgins any more,” Gustav said. “We fucked ’em pretty hard here.” He got a dirty laugh from Rolf and a smile from Max.
Not all the men lying in front of Warberg were dead. Some still thrashed and cried out to the uncaring heavens. An Ivan carrying a white flag came forward. “Permission to pick up our wounded?” he shouted in good German. “An hour’s truce?”
“An hour,” a German officer agreed. “Starting now.” The Russian waved. Stretcher-bearers hurried forward. Gustav swore under his breath. The nerve of them, taking ammo away from him like that!
21
Harry Truman turned on the radio in the Oval Office. After it warmed up, music came out. It wasn’t music he particularly enjoyed, but it didn’t make him want to heave the set through the window and watch it smash on the White House lawn.
Fewer and fewer comedies and dramas were on the radio these days. Some of them had migrated to TV; others had simply disappeared. For more than a few of them, disappearing was the best thing they could have done. Now if only something interesting had taken their place.
Whoever this singer was, he wouldn’t make Sinatra go back to hustling pool and shooting craps in Hoboken. The President endured him because it was almost the top of the hour. Like the papers, radio news helped him keep a finger on the country’s pulse.
The song stopped. The singing commercials that followed it made Truman think Beethoven had done its music and Caruso the singing. It wasn’t that good. They were that bad. He thought only residents of a home for the feebleminded would want to buy the cleanser and soap and margarine they plugged, but some ad man out there was in a high tax bracket because he’d perpetrated them.
Then an announcer said, “This is WRC radio, Washington, D.C., 980 on your dial.” NBC’s familiar chimes followed. The announcer went on, “The National Broadcasting Corporation brings you the news.”
“Good evening,” the newscaster said. “Here is the news. In the war, Red jet bombers have staged nuisance raids against France, Italy, and southern England. Damage is said to be light, and American and English night fighters have claimed several Russian planes as destroyed or damaged. No fighters are known to have been lost.”
Just because they’d claimed them didn’t mean they’d hit them. Those Russian Beagles were pests. They got in, they dropped their bombs, and they got out. They didn’t hang around waiting to get shot down the way the lumbering Soviet Bulls (and identically lumbering American Superfortresses) did. The only thing they couldn’t do was carry atom bombs. Thank God for small favors, thought Truman, who didn’t have many large favors to thank Him for.
“Italian defense authorities have officially denied that Bologna is under Russian control,” the newscaster went on. “They insist that their forces, stiffened by American soldiers and tanks, still hold the important city.”
And that was a bunch of bologna, or Bologna, or plain old baloney, too. Truman knew it was only too well. No matter what the Italians denied, the Red Army was in Bologna. Italy was a backwater in this war, as it had been in the last. Had Stalin wanted to, he could have grabbed much more of it. But his generals were mostly using it as a road to southern France.
American troops waited to try to stop the Russians if they got past the mountains on the border between Italy and France. They waited here and there, scattered across Provence and Savoy. You couldn’t concentrate men the way marshals had all through history. One A-bomb and they would be history themselves. Everybody was having to learn how to fight all over again.
“In Korea, the UN High Command has admitted the fall of the town of Kaeryong to the Red Chinese and North Koreans. Strong defensive positions south of Kaeryong will make it impossible for the enemy to advance any farther.”
Truman wished he had a knock of bourbon. The whiskey might wash the taste of all these lies out of his mouth. The strong defenses had been on the high ground north of Kaeryong. They’d kept back the flood for a long time, but here it was.
“In domestic politics, Senator McCarthy has won the allegiance of two convention delegates from Ohio, which is Senator Taft’s home state,” the broadcaster said.
Truman said something he was glad Bess couldn’t overhear. Her reproachful cluck would have hurt him worse than a smack in the face from someone he cared about less. Even George Marshall would have raised an eyebrow at Truman’s choice of words. The men who’d served the battery of 75s he’d commanded in 1918, though, would have laughed till they had to hold their ribs-not at what he’d said, for they all talked that way Over There, but at the idea that a little cussing could embarrass him.
Well, Joe McCarthy embarrassed him. That the United States could think Joe McCarthy made a good President did more than embarrass him. It scared the crap out of him.
Not that anyone political paid the least attention to a word he said these days. Since announcing he wouldn’t run again, he was a lame duck, a ruptured duck, a dead duck. He’d known he would be. He’d put it off as long as he could.