His section was holding a village somewhere in the western part of the Ukraine. The peasants who lived there disliked the Red Army less than a lot of Ukrainians Ivan had run into. For one thing, they’d found out that the Germans weren’t such a hot bargain. For another, they could see that the NKVD would be calling the shots around here, and the Gestapo wouldn’t. They might not be jumping up and down about it, but they could see their bread had lard smeared on the one side, not on the other.
This particular village had in it a wide-faced blond gal named Feodosiya. She gave Ivan one more good reason not to go out there and get his dick shot off when he didn’t absolutely have to. She’d probably sucked some Feldwebel’s cock when the Germans held this place, but that didn’t bother him. One lesson he’d had hammered into him was that you did what you had to do to get by. That went double for women.
For now, Feodosiya had latched on to him. She didn’t worry about anything past whether what she did felt good and what she could get out of it. She could almost have been a man, in other words.
She saw the same directness in him. “You’re all right,” she told him one time after he slipped out of her. He thought that was what she said, anyhow. No, Ukrainian wasn’t the same as Russian. When Feodosiya wanted to, she could talk so he couldn’t follow her at all. She could get him to understand, though, too, when she felt like it. She did now: “You don’t mess around the way a lot of guys do.”
“Fuck, no, sweetie. Not me.” They lay near the fireplace, on a couple of blankets and under a couple of more. Rain dripped through the thatching on the roof in a few places. A teacup caught a little one, a pot a bigger one. Over in the far corner of the hut, a mud puddle was forming because nothing caught that leak. All the dripping and splashing noises made Ivan want to take a leak himself.
He got out from under the blankets and, naked, walked over to a small birchwood table somebody in the village must have made-somebody who wasn’t much of a carpenter. On the table sat a jar of samogon: homebrew, moonshine, unofficial vodka. Ivan knocked back a slug. Samogon came in every quality, from literal poison to stuff better than you could buy from the state distilleries. This was pretty good, and plenty potent.
“Here.” He carried the jar back to Feodosiya. She sat up to take it. Her tits sagged a bit when she did; she had to be around thirty. Ivan didn’t care. That just meant she knew how, as far as he was concerned. “Here’s some hot water for you,” he said. Except for his cock, he couldn’t think of anything that had as many nicknames as vodka.
She drank. She smiled. “Tak!” she said. That was one of the Ukrainian words Ivan understood. It meant yes. He would have said da-in Russian, tak was an out-loud pause for thought, something like you know-but it wasn’t worth fussing over. Then she said something more, but he had no idea what.
He spread his hands. “C’mon, bitch,” he said. “Talk so an ordinary fucker can follow you.”
“I said, this tastes like the stuff Volodymyr makes.” Feodosiya came closer to ordinary Russian. But the samogon-cooker’s name reminded Ivan he wasn’t in Russia. It should have been Vladimir, dammit.
“Tall, skinny guy with a pointy nose? Kinda looks like a German prick?” he asked. Feodosiya nodded. So did Ivan. “Yeah, that’s who I got it from. Gave him some shchi from the stewpot.” Shchi-cabbage soup-and borscht were Red Army staples. You took cabbages or beets: things you could get almost everywhere. You threw some spices or whatever else you could liberate into the pot with them. You boiled it. If you had any sour cream, you plopped that into the borscht. If you didn’t, you managed without. Either way, you ate.
Feodosiya asked him something else. He frowned-he didn’t get it. She tried again: “Aren’t you cold, standing there with no clothes?”
“Oh, cold. That’s what you meant. Nah, I’m fine,” he answered.
She smiled again. “Probably because you’re so hairy,” she said. Ivan’s frown darkened into a scowl. He knew how hairy he was: hairy enough so people called him the Chimp. They didn’t do it much where he could hear them, though, because he walloped the shit out of them when they did. But then Feodosiya added, “I like my men hairy. That way, I’m sure I’m not messing around with another girl.”
He got back under the blankets with her and guided her hand to his crotch. “Here’s something else to give you a hint,” he said, his good humor altogether restored as her grip tightened on him. They went on from there.
Every so often, he did have to go out on patrol. He didn’t like squelching through the mud any more than anyone else would have. And the Red Army helmet didn’t do one damn thing to keep rain from dripping down the back of his neck. The German model, with its greater flare, had to be better for that.
“German pussies,” he muttered as he slipped from one bush to the next. A squad of Germans, or a company, or a regiment, would still keep some survivors after taking on a like number of Russians. Everybody on both sides knew that. The Germans had better weapons and better tactics. But a German regiment couldn’t knock out three Red Army units the same size, or five. There simply weren’t enough Germans to win the war here.
By now, everybody on both sides knew that, too. Why else would the Fritzes be pulling back? Sooner or later, the Romanians and the Hungarians would jump ship on them. Ivan could see that, so he supposed Hitler also could. Then they’d get stretched even thinner.
Would the Poles bail out on them as well? There, Kuchkov wasn’t so sure. Poles hated Germans. Who didn’t, after all? But Poles hated Russians just as much. The bastards would have to be desperate before they cut a deal.
Motion. “Halt, fucker!” Kuchkov exclaimed, swinging the business end of his PPD toward … a stray dog. The skinny, dripping yellow beast looked even more miserable than he felt himself. But it ran away when he called it, which said it wasn’t such a dumb son of a bitch.
The only sign of Hitlerites Ivan saw was a Nazi helmet with a bullet hole through the side. The Fritz who’d been wearing that helmet would be holding up a lily now-unless that sorry dog had fed on him. Ivan doubted it had; it would have been fatter in that case. Not even a German helmet would keep out a rifle round.
A carrion crow flew off, yelling at Ivan. Maybe it had got its share of carrion from the German who’d used that helmet. Ivan hoped so. He also hoped the crow wouldn’t feast on him any time soon.
Not for a while, he thought. The rasputitsa meant his odds were better, anyhow. He slogged on for a while, then headed back to the village. Feodosiya would be waiting. Even if he didn’t feel like flipping her legs up in the air as soon as he walked into the hut, keeping company with a friendly woman was something he hadn’t done enough of for way too long. In the field, you almost forgot about such things. Almost, but not quite.
Plopped down in the Pacific between Kauai and Midway were assorted little rocks and atolls. In most of the ocean, they would have been nothing but menaces to navigation. For all Pete McGill knew, they remained menaces to navigation right where they were.
But, with the Americans at one end of that stretch and the Japs at the other, those rocks and atolls turned into important menaces to navigation. Most of them remained too small to matter to even the most megalomaniac military mind. Most, but not all. There was, for instance, the one called Tern Island.
Tern Island lay halfway between Midway and the main Hawaiian islands. It was nowhere near as big as Midway, but it was big enough to have its area measured in acres rather than square feet. It was also big enough so as not to disappear when the tide ran high.