Rolf pointed toward a bump behind a swell of ground up in front of them. “Watch out! That’s a-”
Before he could say panzer turret, the T-54 hiding back there showed exactly what it was. Its 100mm gun spat fire. There was a horrible rending crash, a noise somewhere between an accident on the Autobahn and one in a factory. A Sherman ahead of Gustav and to his right brewed up. Smoke and flame belched from every hatch. None of the crewmen got out. Machine-gun ammo made cheerful popping noises as it cooked off.
The Shermans all started shooting at the T-54. The American panzer came in two flavors. One carried a 75mm gun useful only as a door-knocker. The other came with a longer 76mm gun that fired a heavier shell with better muzzle velocity. That weapon was about as good as the long 75mm gun Panzer IVs had mounted: pretty much adequate for the last war, pretty much hopeless in this one.
For all Gustav knew, some of the rounds the Shermans fired hit their target. If they did, they surely scared the men inside the T-54. But scaring them wasn’t the name of the game. Killing them was, and the Shermans couldn’t begin to do it.
The T-54 found another target. Its big, nasty gun fired again. This AP round caught a Sherman in the turret. All the shells in there went off at once. Still burning, the turret slid back over the engine compartment and fell to the ground behind the chassis.
“Christ have mercy on their souls,” Max said. Gustav nodded.
Another Sherman went up in flames before the surviving crews realized this wouldn’t be their day. They used the smoke mortars on their turret roofs to make a screen behind which they could escape. Maybe they’d run into Russian infantry without armor support somewhere else.
To discourage the German infantry from moving up under cover of the smoke, the T-54 lobbed HE shells almost at random. Gustav hit the ground when one kicked up a dirt fountain a hundred meters off to his left. He was just reaching for his entrenching tool when another shell screamed in. This one seemed as if it would burst right on top
–
An American walked into the Hungarian POWs’ barracks. Istvan Szolovits couldn’t have said how he knew at once that the newcomer was an American. He wore the same uniform as the French camp guards. He could have been a Frenchman as far as looks went. He had a thin, dark, intelligent face, with brown hair beginning to fall back at the temples.
But he wasn’t French. Maybe it was the way he carried himself: as if nothing could possibly go wrong. He had German confidence, but not the same arrogance.
Miklos spotted him, too. “Here comes trouble,” the ex-Arrow Cross man said.
He didn’t bother keeping his voice down. Like most Magyars, he assumed no foreigners spoke or understood his language. That wasn’t chauvinism; it was what experience taught. Istvan assumed the same thing.
Which only went to show you couldn’t always trust your assumptions. The American came over to Miklos and Istvan. “Why do you think I’m trouble?” he asked in Magyar as clear as theirs. He didn’t even have the old-timey, backwoods accent Istvan had heard from other Magyar-speaking Yanks. He might have left Budapest week before last.
Whatever he was, he didn’t faze Miklos, who answered, “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t trouble.”
“I love you, too,” the American said. “I’m Imre Kovacs. Who’re you?” He waited while Miklos rattled off his name and pay number. Then he nodded to Istvan. “How about you?” Istvan did the same as Miklos had. Kovacs gave him a once-over. “Rootless cosmopolite, are you?”
“He doesn’t have to answer that,” Miklos said before Istvan could even open his mouth.
“You, sticking up for him?” The American hoisted an eyebrow. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, though. I’m one myself.”
“Maybe I should stick up for Miklos, in that case,” Istvan said.
“Nobody’s got to stick up for anybody. Nothing horrible will happen to either one of you. I’m just going to take you back to the administrative building. I’ll talk with one of you. Another guy who knows your lingo will talk to the other one.”
“We don’t have to answer any questions,” Miklos said. How many times had he been interrogated? By whom? And for what? Istvan suspected he might be better off not knowing the answers to those questions.
“The only things you have to do is come with me to the administrative building,” Imre Kovacs said. “After that, we’ll play it by ear, all right?”
By the look on Miklos’ scarred face, it was a long way from all right. But Kovacs didn’t give him anything on which to hang an objection. The Hungarian-American Jew was too obliging.
“It’ll be fine,” Istvan said.
“Szar az elet,” Miklos answered morosely. Istvan had no good reply to that. Since he’d got dragooned into the Hungarian People’s Army, he’d seen that all too often life was shit.
Maybe it wasn’t if you were American. “C’mon,” Kovacs said, as if inviting them to the corner eatery for a plate of stewed pork and Vienna-style coffee with whipped cream.
They came. Istvan saw no other choice. Miklos looked as if he would rather have fought, but even he could work out that that wasn’t a great plan. If Miklos could work it out, it had to be true.
The Polish football side was practicing on one side of the pitch, the East Germans on the other. Istvan would rather have stopped to watch them than gone on. The Poles had a match against the Hungarian side come Saturday. The East Germans would play the Czechoslovakians on Sunday. Neither encounter was likely to be what the sporting papers called a friendly.
“Here we are,” Kovacs said, as if the POWs didn’t know what the prefab building with the guards out front was.
As promised, another American who spoke Magyar waited inside. He was fluent, but he’d plainly learned it as a foreign language. That made him far more unusual than someone like Kovacs, who’d grown up with it. The other fellow led Miklos into a small room and closed the door behind them. Kovacs took Istvan into another one on the opposite side of the hallway.
His first question was “How’d you get an Arrow Cross thug for a buddy?”
“About the way you’d expect,” Istvan said. “I beat the crap out of him.” He explained how he and Miklos had become acquainted.
“Well, that’s one way to do it, I guess,” Kovacs said. “Other interesting thing is, how come the Reds didn’t purge him?”
“He’s a weapon, the same as a rifle is,” Istvan answered. “Point him at something and he’ll kill it for you. Szalasi’s boys saw that. So did the ones the Russians give orders to. Armies need that kind of people.”
“You’re right. They do.” Imre Kovacs nodded. “What’s your rank, by the way? Even the Geneva Convention says I can ask you that.”
“Me? I’m just a private. My sergeant said he’d make me a lance-corporal when he had the chance, but I got captured before he did it. Can I ask you what yours is?”
Kovacs tapped the two joined silver bars on his collar. “These show I’m a captain.” He eyed Istvan. “You’re smarter than most privates.”
Istvan shrugged. “What about it? It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t even keep you alive, or not very much. It just leaves you scared all the damn time.” He hesitated. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“Thanks. Are you smarter than most American captains? I bet you are.”
“I won’t even try to answer that. You had it straight-it doesn’t matter any which way,” Kovacs said. “So tell me, how do you feel about the proletarian world revolution and the victory of the masses over their capitalist oppressors?”
Had a Russian officer asked him that, Istvan would have known what to say. But would an American captain really believe himself to be fighting on behalf of those capitalist oppressors? Istvan didn’t know enough about America to be sure. Cautiously, he answered with something close to the truth: “I don’t know. It wasn’t my fight, you understand. But when they give you a uniform and a rifle and throw you at the guys on the other side, what are you gonna do? If you don’t shoot at them, you get killed even quicker.”