Sturgis chuckled. He also fired out at the Red Chinese before answering, “Maybe we can smuggle him into the States. Who the hell knows? Or maybe we can pass him on to some new Americans. There’ll be some, bet your ass. We’re gonna occupy this place like we did with Germany.”
“Uh-huh. And look how great that turned out,” Cade said.
“Captain,” Sturgis said earnestly, “as soon as the troopship taking me away from here gets over the horizon, they can blow this whole motherfucking peninsula off the map, north and south together, an’ I won’t shed me one single goddamn tear.” He jumped up onto the firing step, squeezed off two more rounds, and hopped down again.
Cade suspected most surviving Americans held a similar view. He didn’t love Korea or Koreans himself; he was faintly embarrassed that at least one Korean loved him. But his view of the place would be forever tempered by remembering that this was where he’d gone from boy to man in any number of ways.
He took a few shots at the Red Chinese himself. They were already falling back toward their own holes and trenches. They’d shelled, they’d probed, they’d seen they weren’t going to break through. They’d try something else somewhere else, or they’d wait a while and try something else here. They were getting to be pros.
Kaeryong was gone. Cade didn’t know what had happened to Pak Ho-san, or care very much. He just wanted to hang on until America remembered a war was still cooking here and put in enough men and machines to win it. He had no idea how long that would take. Sure as hell, Jimmy might die of old age before he had to fret about getting separated from the regiment.
–
Another Jurassic tank park. Another tank-park sergeant smiling a smarmy, apologetic smile. Another dinosaur of a T-34/85. “Yob tvoyu mat’,” Konstantin Morozov said, and the way he said it warned he was ready to take the tank-park sergeant apart. “I ought to tear your head off and piss in the hole.”
“You shouldn’t talk that way,” said the tank-park sergeant, who’d obviously heard obscene suggestions from other tank commanders before Konstantin. “It’s a fine machine, and-”
“I don’t see you in the fucking antique,” Morozov broke in. “Some other chancreface gave us one before, and it got killed out from under us in nothing flat. Just lucky the bazooka hit the engine compartment, or we’d be pushing up daisies right now-and you’d give this cunt to some other dumb prick.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do-”
“I want you to give us a real tank, not a kiddy car. The Hitlerites built better tanks than this, and that was years ago.”
“Do you want to tell that to an officer, Comrade Sergeant?”
The question had cowed Morozov once. Not twice. “Bet your pussy I do, you assfucking whore.” Konstantin didn’t care what he said. Nothing a lieutenant or a captain could do to him was likely to be worse than sticking him in a T-34/85 again.
Biting his lip, the tank-park sergeant stomped away. When he came back, he came back not with a company-grade officer but with a gray-haired lieutenant colonel. Morozov’s crewmen looked ready to let the dirt swallow them. He didn’t worry about it. The man wasn’t going to shoot him on the spot.
“So what are you giving Ninel a hard time about?” the senior officer demanded.
Ninel! The tank-park sergeant had had good Red parents. In the aftermath of the glorious proletarian revolution, quite a few Soviet babies got tagged with Lenin’s name spelled backward. As far as Konstantin was concerned, though, it sounded precious if not swishy. And it had nothing to do with the price of sausage.
He spoke to what did: “What for, Comrade Colonel? Because my men and I don’t deserve to die in this hunk of junk, that’s what. Like I told your Ninel, we already had one of them smashed with us in it. I fought through the last war, sir. You want to see my scars? I had T-34/85s killed by the Hitlerites with tanks not half as good as what the enemy uses now. We go back into this clunker, it’s murder, nothing else but….Sir.”
The lieutenant colonel glowered. “I can have you court-martialed and shot inside of fifteen minutes, Sergeant.”
“Go ahead, sir. Whatever the pricks with the rifles do, it won’t be as bad as when a Pershing slams a round through my glacis plate. And the round will get through, too, because that armor might as well be tinfoil. It can’t keep anything out.”
“What makes you deserve a T-54 and not somebody else?”
“I’m a damn good tank commander, Comrade Colonel, that’s what. I’ve got a damn good crew. Give us a damn good tank so we have the chance to serve the Soviet Union the best way we can.”
“You’re living on borrowed time, Sergeant,” the officer rumbled.
“Tell me something I didn’t know, sir,” Konstantin replied with a laugh. “The Nazis have blown me up. So have the Americans. If I’d been any closer to an A-bomb, I wouldn’t be arguing with you now. But if you stuff me into this tin can”-he spat at the T-34/85-“all I’ve borrowed gets paid back right now.”
He wondered if he’d overplayed his hand. By the way Vazgen Sarkisyan’s eyes-and Demyan Belitsky’s, too-bugged out of their heads, they were sure he had. The lieutenant colonel studied him. The burn scar on the side of the man’s neck said he’d seen action himself, and probably been lucky to get out of a blazing tank.
He nodded to himself with the air of a man who’d made up his mind. “Ninel!”
“Yes, Comrade Colonel?” By the eager way the tank-park sergeant said it, he expected the next order to be Place these men under arrest! Konstantin more than half expected the same thing.
But the gray-haired lieutenant colonel said, “Put these men in a T-54. They won’t need the bow gunner. We’ll find a crew short a man for him.”
Ninel stared as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Comrade Colonel?”
“You heard me. Do it.” The officer waited.
“I serve the Soviet Union!” the tank-park sergeant choked out.
Konstantin clapped Ilya Goledod on the back. “Good luck, pal,” he said.
“Thanks,” Goledod said. “You, too.”
They squeezed each other. Goledod said his good-byes to the other men in the crew. Konstantin rounded on the tank-park sergeant. “Come on, Ninel. Give us something that may keep us alive for twenty minutes.”
“Take them to the one with Za Stalina! painted on the turret,” the lieutenant colonel said. Ninel’s face fell. If he’d planned to stick them with a lemon, he wouldn’t get the chance now.
The T-54 was…a T-54. It wasn’t new. Konstantin’s nose told him another crew had been in there before his-had, in fact, been killed in there. Kerosene smelled better than spoiling flesh and blood.
Juris Eigims peered through the magnifying gunsight. “Well, this is more like it,” he said. “I’ve got a chance of hitting what I aim at.”
“You never did get a shot off in the old sow, did you?” Konstantin said.
“Nyet.” The gunner shook his head. But then he held up a hand. “Wait! I was going to say, the rocket hit us before I could. But I did blast that guy who shot us on the way to the regiment. I didn’t fire at any enemy tanks, though.”
“Oh, yeah, the other asshole with the bazooka. I forgot about him. How did I do that?” But Morozov knew too well how he’d done it. He’d been in so many tight spots, he couldn’t keep track of them all any more. That had to be a bad sign. If it didn’t mean death was gaining on him, he couldn’t imagine what it would signify. Shaking his head, he used the intercom: “Fire this bastard up, Demyan.”
“I’ll do it, Comrade Sergeant,” Belitsky answered. That told Konstantin the system worked, which was more than it had in the T-34/85. The big diesel behind the fighting compartment started right away. It sounded smoother than the relic’s motor had. That was good, anyhow.
Morozov stuck his head out of the cupola. Ninel still stood beside the tank, looking as if he’d just swallowed a big swig of vinegar. “Where do we find regimental HQ?” Konstantin asked him. He had to shout; the engine’s blatting seemed louder when thick steel didn’t shield him from it.
“Eight or ten kilometers up the road, in Dassel,” the tank-park sergeant shouted back, pointing to show the way.
“Spasibo,” Konstantin said. He relayed the instructions to Belitsky. The T-54 got moving. It occurred to Morozov that dear Ninel might be lying. But if a tank couldn’t take care of itself, what in this world could?
Dassel wouldn’t have been anything much before the Red Army overran it. It was even less now. The defenders had fought fiercely to keep Soviet troops out, the Russians just as ferociously to break in. It looked to have been bombed and strafed a few times, too. Only a handful of scrawny Fritzes skulked along the rubble-strewn streets.
But the headquarters did lie at the western edge of the shattered town. The CO seemed glad to see Konstantin, and even gladder to see his T-54. He was a major named Genrikh Zhuk. He’d likely been a junior lieutenant last time around. “Do you come from the tank park off to the east?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Morozov said. “Why?”
“How did you pry a real machine out of them instead of a retread?”
“I made a perfect son of a bitch out of myself, Comrade Major,” Konstantin answered. “I’ve been in one of those old crocks this war. Two would’ve been too many.”
“Sergeant, you’re my kind of man,” Zhuk said. “The more sons of bitches we’ve got, the better we’ll do.” They nodded to each other, both of them smiling.