When Ivan Kuchkov peeked out of his foxhole, he saw something you didn’t see very often: a German waving a white flag. In this part of the front, the Nazis and the Red Army were pretty mixed up. They’d been going back and forth at each other for a couple of weeks now. The Germans had given up more ground than they’d taken, but some villages had gone back and forth two or three times. There wasn’t much left of those places.
The Hitlerite with the white flag shouted something in his own language. It was just noise to Kuchkov. “Hey, Sasha,” he called, “what the fuck is the dumb cunt going on about?”
Sasha Davidov knew Yiddish, not German, but they were closer to each other than Russian and the Ukrainian grunting they used down here. The Jew could follow what the Feldgrau bastard was saying, anyhow. “He wants a truce to pick up the wounded,” Davidov reported.
Firing on both sides eased off as men saw the white flag and waited to find out what would come of it. Ivan waited to discover whether any Soviet officers were in earshot. They’d speak German, odds were. And they could decide about the truce, too, so he wouldn’t have to take out his dick and lay it on the block.
Only there didn’t seem to be any around. He wondered what had happened to Lieutenant Obolensky. Maybe the company commander’d caught one in this latest firefight. Wounded men moaned. A couple of wounded men wailed. Russian and German agony sounded pretty much the same. Some of those sorry buggers might live if they got picked up. Of course, the NKVD pricks had their eye on him because of the mess with the politruk, and they were liable to say he was plotting with the enemy if he accepted the ceasefire.
Fuck them, too, in the neck, he thought. To Davidov, he said, “Tell him he can have an hour.”
When the point man yelled to the Fritz, it didn’t sound as if they were speaking quite the same language. The German shouted back. “He agrees,” the skinny little point man said. “He says thank you, too.”
“Tell him to screw himself,” Kuchkov said. When the Jew hesitated, Ivan snapped, “Tell him, dammit!”
Davidov yelled again. The German shouted back, in accented but understandable Russian: “Yob tvoyu mat’!”
Ivan laughed. He came out of his hole and stood up. Most Germans didn’t seem like human beings to him at all. But if you cussed one and he cussed you back, you couldn’t very well not see a man there.
Cautiously, Red Army men and Hitlerites emerged from cover. Nobody put down his rifle or machine pistol, but nobody fired, either. A couple of Germans swigged vodka from Russian canteens. A couple of Russians drank German schnapps. The Fritzes swapped some of their tubed meats for Russian tobacco. Ivan thought his side won that deal, but everybody knew Germans were dopes when they weren’t killing things.
Stretcher-bearers from both sides lugged away the wounded men they could find. Kuchkov noticed a Russian dragging a dead German off by his boots. They were good boots; he suspected the Red Army man would wear them if they fit and sell them if they didn’t. He also suspected the Germans would try to stop the Russian if they noticed him stealing their Kamerad’s corpse. But they didn’t, so he didn’t need to worry about that.
“Fünf Minuten!” shouted the Fritz who’d asked for the truce. He held up his hand with the fingers spread.
“Five minutes,” Sasha Davidov translated.
“Thanks a fuck of a lot, bitch,” Ivan said sarcastically. Sasha looked wounded. “Yeah, yeah,” Kuchkov soothed him. “Some of our guys are stupid pricks. I know.” He needed to keep Davidov happy, or as happy as Davidov could get. The Jew started at his own shadow, but he didn’t run from a fight. And when they were moving forward, he made the best point man Ivan had ever seen. Because he was so skinny and nervous, he never led the rest of the guys into a trap.
That German waved to Ivan, then turned and walked toward the hole from which he’d come. Ivan’s right index finger twitched-he wanted to fire a burst from his PPD into the Hitlerite’s back. The son of a bitch would never know what hit him. But Kuchkov couldn’t see enough advantage in it to make it worth his while.
A German ceremoniously fired a Mauser into the air to signal that the ceasefire was over. Kuchkov squeezed off a three-round burst with his machine pistol, also aiming at nothing and nobody. A minute later, one of Hitler’s saws opened up. Both sides got back to the serious business of trying to slaughter each other.
“Hey, Sasha!” Ivan called.
“What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” the Jew asked. He was only a senior private, but he had more sense than anybody else in the section. Kuchkov thought his judgment worth having.
So he asked, “You think we can get around behind that little swell of ground off to the right? I saw the Nazi dickheads didn’t hardly post anybody over there.”
“Can the guys who don’t move lay down enough fire so they don’t know we’re sliding around till we take ’em from the flank?” Davidov asked in return.
Ivan considered. After a few seconds, he said, “Fuckin’ right, they can. Take half a dozen men and do it. We won’t let the Hitlerite cocksuckers have a clue they’re gonna get it up the ass.”
Davidov and the soldiers he’d chosen crawled away through the weeds and bushes, their bellies as flat against the ground as if they were so many slugs. The rest of the Red Army men sprayed bullets around so the Germans wouldn’t suspect the flanking move. About half of them carried PPDs or captured Schmeissers, so they had no trouble making a big racket.
As soon as the firing from the right started, Kuchkov yelled, “Come on, you sorry fuckers! Let’s get ’em!” He scrambled out of his hole and scurried toward the German positions. Other khaki-clad men came with him. If they’d sat there playing with their dicks, they could have got rid of him for good.
One of the Fritzes fired at him from no more than ten meters away. The rattled German missed. Ivan cut him down with a long PPD burst while the Nazi was still working the bolt on his rifle. He smashed in another Hitlerite’s face with his German-made entrenching tool when the man popped up in front of him like a rabbit coming up out of its burrow. The German screamed like a rabbit, too, and fell over on his back.
Then all the Nazis were running away. They liked flank attacks no better than Russians or anybody else.
Somewhere back there, the Germans had a couple of more MG-42s. Their pitiless snarl warned the Red Army men with Kuchkov not to get too bold in the pursuit. Instead, the Russians fell to plundering the corpses of the Fritzes they’d killed. Food, leather goods, grenades, trench knives, folding entrenching tools, water bottles-none of that stuff would go to waste.
Ivan kicked a dead German’s helmet as if it were a football. It spun through the bushes. He wished he could paint it khaki and stick it on his own head. It was of better steel and protected more of a man’s dome than its Soviet equivalent. But that wouldn’t work. The instantly recognizable shape would get him shot by his own side.
Here came Sasha Davidov with German black bread and tubes of meat paste or butter. “Good job, motherfucker!” Ivan said, and slapped him on the back hard enough to stagger him.
“Thanks, Comrade Sergeant.” The Jew squeezed something pale and yellow onto a chunk of bread and offered it to Kuchkov. “Here. I know which side it’s buttered on.” They both laughed and laughed. Why not? They’d both stayed alive to do it.
The men in Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s squadron sprawled on the grass by their airstrip. Rudel had his visored officer’s cap pulled down low on his forehead, and he wasn’t the only one. It had started drizzling a little while earlier. The sky was the color of pewter. Summer might not be over, but it wouldn’t last much longer.
Colonel Steinbrenner stood in front of the assembled flyers and groundcrew men. “Boys, I know you’ll be glad to listen to a talk from the National Socialist Loyalty Officer, Major Keller. So pay attention to what he’s got to say to you, right? Heil Hitler!”