Of course, Soviet ground troops who needed air support during the rasputitsa also didn’t get it. Soviet infantry and armor generals, though, mostly knew better than to put their men in spots like that during the fall rains and the spring thaw. Mostly. Like every other army since the beginning of time, Stalin’s had its share of high-ranking donkeys.
Whether the generals knew he couldn’t fly right now or not, Anastas Mouradian understood it perfectly well. So did every other pilot and copilot in his squadron. They caught up on their sleep. They ate like pigs. Some of them helped groundcrew men work on engines and controls and other things on their planes that needed repair.
Quite a few of them drank their way through the mud time. And when a Russian drank, he didn’t drink to get a little buzz and to laugh louder than he would have sober. A Russian drank to get drunk, to drown himself in vodka.
Staying loaded for six weeks twice a year horrified Stas. He had but one liver to give for his country, and filling himself full of antifreeze like that wasn’t his idea of fun. But the Russians who did drink like that seemed to manage fine. And when the fighting started up again and they had to go back to flying, they sobered up enough to do their jobs.
But the rasputitsa was a lonely season for him. Being sober when most of the people around you had got wrecked wasn’t much fun. Ironically, the best companion he had was his copilot and ancient enemy, Isa Mogamedov. Whether he was a Muslim who clung to his faith’s ban against alcohol or he was simply moderate like a lot of people from the Caucasus, he didn’t make a hobby of getting shitfaced whenever he couldn’t fly.
They played chess to kill time, which wasn’t something you could do drunk. The Azeri won three or four times for every victory Stas managed to scratch out. He likely could have won more often than that. But, like any good wagon driver, he saw that the horse had to get a carrot every once in a while or it would simply refuse to go.
When they weren’t playing chess, they talked. Each flavored his Russian with a different accent: Mouradian’s throaty, Mogamedov’s more hissing. The old imperial language was the only one they shared. They talked endlessly about the Pe-2, how to make it bomb better and how to get away when the 109s and 190s zipped through the sky like hornets.
Stas would have liked to talk about other things. One of these days, the war would end. He was starting to hope he might live through it. What kind of country would the Soviet Union be afterwards? What kind of chances would a still-young veteran find in it? Would they know true Communism at last, or would things stay more complicated?
He would have bet Mogamedov wondered about such things, too. But if the Azeri did, he said no more about them than Anastas Mouradian. You might talk about things like that with your brother. If you were a trusting soul, you might even talk about them with the first cousin who’d grown up across the street from you. Either way, you’d do it late at night, behind doors not just closed but locked, and very likely in the dark.
Talk about them with your bomber crewmate? Yes, you kept each other alive every time you pulled back the yoke and brought the Pe-2 up into the air again. That was one thing. Trusting your crewmate not to sell you out to the NKVD? That was something else again. If the Great Terror of the 1930s proved anything, it proved you couldn’t trust anybody not to sell you out.
And so they talked about cylinders and carburetors and keeping an eye on the armorers when they were loading the ammunition belts that fed the Pe-2’s machine guns. If the bastards weren’t careful, a gun would jam just when you needed it most.
Mogamedov said, “You have to make sure they’re sober when they’re putting the cartridges into the belts, too.”
“Some people do take some watching, don’t they?” Stas agreed. Neither of them said out loud that most of the groundcrew men were Russians, and that most Russians would get smashed on any day of the week that had day in it. Not in so many words, they didn’t. But both of them looked at the most numerous folk in the USSR from the outside. Jews also did that. It was no accident that so many men from the Caucasus and Jews had risen to the top of the Soviet power pyramid. Outsiders were driven harder than those who had numbers on their side.
Back when the last war started, a lot of Russia’s top generals had had German blood. But that had nothing to do with competence: only with noble blood. If those Russian generals with German names had known what they were doing, Stas knew he might be flying a plane with the Tsar’s old red, white, and blue markings on it. But they hadn’t, and the Red revolution swept them all away.
Not quite out of the blue, Mogamedov said, “We will beat the Hitlerites. I’m sure of it.”
“Of course we will.” Stas couldn’t very well have said anything else. To doubt victory out loud was to ask for a bullet in the back of the neck; someone stupid enough to do that was too stupid to be worth anything in the gulag. The NKVD would think so, anyhow. He added, “The way the Nazis treat the lands they stole from us shows how well off we are under General Secretary Stalin.”
“It does!” Mogamedov beamed at him. “That’s very well put.”
“Spasibo,” Stas said modestly. He felt like a man who had plenty to be modest about, all right. If it took a foreign invasion where the enemy destroyed everything he could and enslaved and brutalized everyone whose land he overran to make Stalin seem good by comparison, what kind of recommendation was that for the Soviet ruler?
But it did sound good, especially if you said it without audible irony. Stas appreciated irony in its place. He used it when he was talking about things where it wouldn’t land him in trouble: unappetizing rations, say, or anything else where anyone would grouse. Sometimes even Russians smiled when he did.
If you aimed irony at the Soviet government, though, it would aim something back at you. One of those bullets in the back of the neck, maybe, in a Lubyanka basement. Or a twenty-five-year term at a camp north of the Arctic Circle. They rarely bothered with mere tenners any more. A term like that would also kill you, and might not take much longer to do the job than a pistol shot would. If they sent you off to Kolyma for twenty-five, you’d never see Armenia again-that was for sure.
“I want to bomb Berlin, that’s what I want to do,” Mogamedov said. “They’ve dropped plenty on us. I want to pay them back, let the sons of bitches see what it’s like.”
“There you go!” Stas clapped his hands. “Blow that stupid, ugly toothbrush mustache right off Hitler’s lip!” He’d started the war flying out of an airstrip in Slovakia, bombing the German invaders of Bohemia and Moravia. That was as close to hitting Germany as he’d come.
Some Russian flyers had bombed Berlin, as the English and the French had. But Soviet long-range bombers were slow and lumbering. No one talked about it in tones much above a whisper, but only a fraction of the ones that took off to strike the German capital made it back to the Rodina again.
Mogamedov lit a papiros. He offered the pack to Stas, who took one with a word of thanks. The Azeri said, “If we keep dropping shit on the Germans’ heads here, sooner or later we’ll push them back far enough so our Pe-2s can reach Berlin.”
“After the mud dries out,” Stas said. Isa Mogamedov nodded.
If there was a more backbreaking, filth-making job than replacing a thrown panzer track in Russian mud and rain, Theo Hossbach couldn’t imagine what it might be. The job, in fact, was nasty enough to have pried several swear words out from between his usually tight-buttoned lips.
And what he said sounded like love poetry next to the fusillade of curses that poured from Adi Stoss. Most of what the driver said was aimed at himself. His tight left turn, after all, was what had made the Panzer IV shed the track in the first place.