Rasputitsa. The mud time. Russian had a word for it. It came in both fall and spring; in fall because of rain, in spring from melting snow. The spring rasputitsa was worse, and lasted longer. Not just airplanes would be grounded. Armies would slow to a crawl, if they moved at all.
Sergei didn't think the Soviet generals had intended to keep on fighting the Poles till the rasputitsa came. He didn't think they'd intended to draw the Nazis in on the Poles' side, either.
He did keep what he thought to himself. If he said something like that out loud, he'd end up in a place where the spring thaw started in June…if it ever did. The USSR had plenty of places like that, and plenty of people had found out more about them than they ever wanted to know.
He had the feeling he wasn't the only one in his squadron thinking thoughts the NKVD wouldn't like. Meals became oddly constrained. Men seemed to be chewing on more than sausage and black bread, swallowing more than tea and vodka. You couldn't ask another pilot or navigator what was on his mind. If he told you, he proved himself a fool with a death wish. He was much more likely to say something innocuous and peg you for an informer. Sergei knew he didn't trust a couple of his fellow pilots. You had to watch out. If the enemy didn't get you, your own side would.
His bombardier had a simple solution. "Fuck 'em all," Ivan Kuchkov declared. "Fuck their mothers. Fuck their grannies, too, the filthy old cunts." To him, that wasn't mat. It was the way he talked. Maybe he didn't know where ordinary Russian stopped and mat started. Maybe he just didn't care.
"Some of these people you have to be careful around," Sergei said…carefully.
"I suppose," Kuchkov said with a noncom's sigh about the foibles of his superiors. "The guys who think they have big dicks are the guys who're big pricks, all right."
"Right." Yaroslavsky wondered why he bothered. He stood a better chance of talking a thunderstorm into changing its ways than he did of persuading Ivan.
But not even the NKVD could send a thunderstorm to a camp in Siberia. Ivan Kuchkov wasn't so lucky. The blocky bombardier amazed Sergei by winking at him. "Don't get your tit in a wringer, Captain," he said. "They never come after the likes of me. I'm not worth bothering with."
"How many other people have thought the same thing?" Sergei said. "How many of them turned out to be wrong?"
"Poor sorry fuckers," Kuchkov said. Sergei started to nod, then caught himself. He'd already said more to Ivan than to any of his fellow officers, even Anastas Mouradian. If Ivan was a fellow with a pipeline to the NKVD, he'd said more than enough to hang himself.
He eyed the bombardier's broad, rather stupid face. Ivan Kuchkov was a Russian peasant of purest ray serene. Surely he didn't have the brains to inform on anybody…did he?
You never could tell. That was the first rule. There was that iron-jawed commissar who looked even more like a village pig butcher than Kuchkov did. What was his name? Khrushchev, that was it. Yes, he sure seemed the type who'd take off his shoe and pound it on the bar if he got into an argument. And if that didn't work, he'd pound it on your head.
But, regardless of what he looked like, he was nobody's fool. He'd lived through the purges, after all, when so many hadn't. So maybe dear Ivan wasn't as dumb as he let on, either.
Their SB-2 got off the ground to fly a mission against a Luftwaffe airstrip in eastern Poland. As Sergei guided the bomber into formation with the others, he wondered when the rasputitsa would close down operations. Muck had flown from the Tupolev's tires as it roared down the strip, but it got airborne. Make the mud a little thicker, a little gooier, and it wouldn't.
One way to deal with the problem would have been to pave runways. That never crossed Yaroslavsky's mind. Soviet authorities didn't pave highways between towns, not least because invaders could have used paved roads, too. But if the highways weren't paved, airstrips weren't likely to be, either.
"Here's hoping we give the Nazis a nice surprise," Anastas Mouradian said.
"That would be good," Sergei agreed.
"Better than good," his copilot said. "If we don't surprise them, they're liable to surprise us, and getting surprised by a bunch of Germans doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun."
"Er-right." Sergei gave the Armenian a funny look. Did Mouradian talk that way because he was making a joke or because his Russian was slipping? Maybe it was both together; Anastas did like to make jokes, but they didn't always come out the way he wanted.
Maybe that was why Stalin and Beria and Mikoyan and the other formidable fellows from the Caucasus cut such a swath through Soviet politics-the Russians who were trying to deal with them couldn't figure out what the devil they were talking about till too late. Yaroslavsky didn't say that to Anastas. One more time-you never could tell. If the Armenian took it wrong, it might end up as a one-way ticket to a labor camp.
And then Sergei forgot about it. Me-109s tore into the Soviet bombers. The plane just in front of his spun down toward the dappled ground trailing flame from its left engine. Another SB-2, fortunately farther away, blew up in midair. That felt worse than a near miss from an antiaircraft shell; Sergei's bomber staggered as if bouncing off a wall.
One of the rear machine guns chattered. Kuchkov's voice came through the voice tube: "These pricks are all over everywhere like crabs on cunt hair! Do something about it, for Christ's sake!"
Off to Sergei's left, a Soviet bomber dropped its load over nothing in particular, broke formation, and scooted for Byelorussia. That looked like cowardice. Another SB-2 went down, and then another. However the Fascists had found out about this attack, they were all over it. What had seemed cowardice a moment before began to look more and more like good sense.
Sergei fired the forward machine gun at a 109. Tracers didn't come close. The German fighter flipped away with almost contemptuous ease. During the Spanish Civil War, the SB-2 outran and outclimbed Nationalist fighters. Everybody said so. But those German and Italian biplanes must have been mighty clumsy. As Yaroslavsky had first seen in Czechoslovakia, the bomber was no match for a Messerschmitt.
One more SB-2 tumbled in flames. That was enough-no, too much-for Sergei. "Dump the bombs, Ivan!" he yelled into the speaking tube. "We're heading for home!"
"Now you're talking, boss!" Kuchkov said. Grating metallic noises said he was opening the bay and pulling release levers as fast as he could. Half a dozen 220kg bombs whistled toward the ground. "They're bound to come down on some mother's head," Kuchkov called cheerfully.
He wasn't even wrong; Sergei could console himself with that thought. He hauled the SB-2 around and roared east at full throttle. Maybe it could outrun an Italian Fiat. Next to a 109, he might have been piloting a garbage scow. The airspeed indicator said he was making better than 400 kilometers an hour. All the same, he felt nailed in place in the sky. When a Messerschmitt could get up over 550, how could anybody blame him, either?
Kuchkov's ventral machine gun barked again. The bombardier let out a shout of triumph-or was it surprise? "Nailed the fucker!" he roared.
"Damned if he didn't." Anastas Mouradian certainly sounded surprised. As bomb-aimer, he had a better view below than Sergei did. "The pilot managed to get out and hit the silk."