One of the pilots swore violently. He spoke Russian with a Ukrainian accent, so that some of his g's turned into h's. Sergei wondered if he was from Zhitomir or had family there.
"General Secretary Stalin has vowed vengeance against the evil Polish regime," the announcer went on. "Our bombers have targeted Warsaw for retaliation."
Our bombers taking off from where? Sergei wondered. He would have bet piles of rubles that nobody could fly from anywhere near Minsk. Maybe things were better farther south, down toward the Ukraine. He supposed they must have been, or the Poles couldn't have struck at it. In this blizzard, they must have been bombing by dead reckoning-and damned lucky to boot-to hit Minsk at all.
Then the man reading the news said, "Observers in Minsk report that some of the planes striking the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic were German Heinkels and Dorniers. And so we see that the Hitlerites are indeed supporting their semifascist stooges in Warsaw. They too shall suffer the righteous wrath of the workers and people of the Soviet Union."
Several flyers sitting around the table nodded. Sergei started to do the same thing. Then he caught himself. How the devil could observers in Minsk identify the bombers overhead? Minsk wasn't far from here. It had to be as socked in as this miserable airstrip was.
Sergei opened his mouth to say something about that. Before he could, Anastas Mouradian caught his eye. Ever so slightly-Sergei didn't think any of the other flyers noticed it-his copilot shook his head.
The newsman continued, giving more reports of the Poles' atrocities and then going on to talk about the war news from Western Europe. Sergei ended up keeping quiet. Mouradian was bound to be right. If the authorities told lies and you pointed it out, who would get in trouble? The authorities? Or you?
Asking the question was the same as answering it.
Did the rest of the flyers see that the newsman was full of crap when he talked about Minsk? Or didn't they even notice? Were they so used to believing everything they heard on the radio that they couldn't do anything else?
Then something else occurred to Sergei. He grabbed the vodka bottle and took a good swig from it. But not even vodka could drown the subversive thought. If that newsman was lying about the weather in Minsk, what else was he lying about? Had the Poles really bombed the city at all? Had the Germans joined them? How much of what he said about the war in the West was true?
Was anything he said true? Anything at all?
How could you know? How could you even begin to guess? Oh, some things were bound to be true, because what point would there be to lying about them? But others? Had the top ranks of the Soviet military really been as full of traitors and wreckers as the recent purges left people believing? If they hadn't…
Even with the fresh slug of vodka coursing through him on top of everything else he'd drunk, Sergei recognized a dangerous thought when he tripped over one. You couldn't say anything like that, not unless you wanted to find out exactly what kind of weather Siberia had.
Or would they just shoot you if they realized you realized they didn't always tell the truth? He wouldn't have been surprised. What could be more dangerous to the people who ran things?
Anastas watched him from across the table. Did the Armenian know what he was thinking? Did Mouradian think the same things, too? Then Sergei stopped worrying about himself, because the Russian newsman went on, "Since German planes were used in the terror bombings of peaceful Soviet cities, justice demands that we also retaliate against the Fascist Hitlerite swine. This being so, Red Air Force bombers have struck at the Prussian city of Konigsberg. Damage to the enemies of the people is reported to be extremely heavy. They richly deserve the devastation visited upon them!"
"Bozhemoi," whispered somebody down the table from Sergei. It sounded too reverent to be conventional cursing. Nobody reprimanded the flyer, though-not after that news!
No matter what Sergei had been thinking, he didn't doubt this for a moment. The USSR wouldn't claim to have bombed Germany if it hadn't really done it. And if the USSR bombed Germany…In that case, the war against Hitler had just gone from the back burner to the front.
Maybe those were Heinkels and Dorniers up there, inaccurately bombing the airstrip. Maybe Germans in field-gray would join Poles in greenish brown (although the Poles, like the Soviets, had the sense to wear white camouflage smocks in the wintertime). Maybe Hitler and Smigly-Ridz would show the world what the USSR already knew: they'd been in bed with each other all along.
A different announcer exhorted his listeners to buy war bonds. "Help make farmers and workers safe from the threat of Fascism!" he boomed. "Subscribe to the latest war bond program!"
Sergei already bought war bonds. So did everyone else in the Red Air Force and Army and Navy. Contributions came out of their pay before they ever set eyes on it. Losing the money didn't hurt nearly so much that way as it would have if Sergei'd had to dig into his own pockets.
"As long as the Nazis stay busy in the West, we'll do fine against them," Koroteyev said.
Several men nodded. Sergei was one of them. Then Anastas Mouradian said, "Sure we will-just like we did in the last war."
Silence slammed down around the table. Germany had been busy against France and England and Belgium in 1914-everybody knew that. And everybody also knew the Kaiser's armies had smashed the Tsar's again and again. If not for one disaster after another on the front, the Revolution might never have started, much less succeeded.
The Siberian looked at Anastas. "One of these days, you'll open your mouth so wide, you'll fall right in."
"No doubt, Comrade," Mouradian replied. "If it can happen to the whole country, why can't it happen to me?"
That only brought more silence. People stared at the Armenian, then quickly looked away. They might have been gaping at a car wreck. "How much have you drunk?" Sergei asked. Sometimes you could get out of trouble by blaming it all on the vodka. He'd done that himself a time or three.
His copilot gave the question his usual serious-if not sober-consideration. "Either too much or not enough," Mouradian said at last. "And it's not too much, so…" He grabbed the vodka bottle, raised it, and tilted his head back.
Sergei reached out and grabbed it away from him. "To each according to his needs," he said, and got rid of what was left. With the air of a man performing a conjuring trick, the Siberian produced another bottle. Loud applause greeted it. The drinking went on. With any luck at all, by this time tomorrow nobody would remember what one mouthy Armenian was going on about. • • • SOME OF THE MEN IN Hideki Fujita's squad were from Hokkaido. The northern island was notorious for winter weather that blew straight down from Siberia. Fujita had been through some rotten winters himself before they shipped him off to the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia.
Or he thought he had, anyhow.
Now he had to admit that what he'd known about winter was about the same as what an eleven-year-old knew about love. The kid could imagine he understood what was what. And a jackass could suppose it was a nightingale, too. That didn't make it sound like one when it opened its mouth, though.
Fujita wore a fur cap-the earflaps, at the moment, down. He wore a thick, heavily lined, fur-collared greatcoat. It was double-breasted, to make it harder for drafts to sneak in. He had stout gray felt mittens and knee-high felt boots with leather uppers. He had on two pairs of wool socks and two pairs of long woolen underwear.
He was freezing his ass off just the same. You had to go out on patrol, freezing or not. If you didn't, the Russians or the Mongols would make you sorry. The Russians were used to cold weather-like what Hokkaido got, this stuff blew down from Siberia. The Mongols were used to it, too. And the Mongols were as sneaky, and as dangerous, as so many poisonous snakes. They could slither through openings where you didn't think there were any.