Here was a burning village that had been on the German side of the line for a long time but now found itself in Soviet hands once more. Stas couldn’t see any of the human dramas down there, either, but this scene had played out many times before farther east. Some of the peasants would have cozied up to the Nazis, either because they liked Hitler better than Stalin or just because they thought that was the best way to keep their bellies full and their wives and daughters unraped.
And now they would pay for guessing wrong. Their neighbors would want revenge. The NKVD would want to pay back treason. If the peasants were lucky, they’d go straight into punishment battalions. There, at least, they had a small chance of coming out in one piece. If they weren’t so lucky, they’d go to the gulags instead. Or they’d simply meet a noose or a bullet to the base of the skull.
Their wives and daughters still might get forced. Only the uniforms of the men holding them down would be different.
The squadron didn’t fly over Minsk. The Pe-2s took a dogleg to swing south of the city. The Red Air Force had found out by painful experience that the Fascists had packed the place with antiaircraft guns. German gunners had both skill and enthusiasm. You didn’t want to give them a shot at you if you didn’t have to. For that matter, you didn’t want to give them a shot at you even when you did have to.
But skirting the flak guns took the squadron straight into a swarm of marauding FW-190s. Stas hated the new German fighter. A Pe-2 had a fair chance against a 109. Odds when you ran into 190s were worse. They had more speed, heavier guns, and a cockpit that gave their pilots terrific all-around vision. They were Trouble with a capital T.
“Dump the bombs!” Stas shouted into the speaking tube that carried his voice back to the bomb bay.
“I’m fucking doing it,” Fyodor Mechnikov answered. The bomb-bay doors opened. The explosives would come down on somebody, with luck on somebody German. Mouradian wasn’t inclined to be fussy. Designers always claimed that their brainstorms were fighting bombers. They always lied. Fighters were made for just one thing: shooting down other planes. Bombers had to do other things, too, and couldn’t fight back so well.
Suddenly lighter by upwards of a tonne, the Pe-2 got faster and more nimble. All the same, Stas stayed low and gunned the bomber for every kopek it was worth. The best way to deal with German fighters was not to hang around anywhere close to them.
But then the machine gun in the dorsal turret chattered. “Eat shit, you whore!” Mechnikov shouted at the fighter he was trying to drive off.
Bullets slammed into the Pe-2. There was no fire. The engines kept running. When Stas cautiously tried the controls, they worked. No hydraulic lines punctured. No wires cut. That was all luck, of course-nothing else but. The German pilot who’d put the burst into the Pe-2 had to be cursing his. He’d done everything right. He just hadn’t managed to knock the bomber out of the sky.
Stas fired a burst at the FW-190 as it streaked past. He didn’t do it any harm, either. It zoomed away to go after some of the other planes in the squadron. That suited Mouradian fine. “We scared off the son of a bitch, anyhow,” he said.
“That’s right. Fedya must have taught him respect.” Mogamedov spoke with perhaps less irony than he’d intended.
“If he hadn’t been up there banging away, that burst the Hitlerite hit us with would have been longer. It might have done us a lot of harm.” Stas kept eyeing the gauges. Everything was jammed up hard against the emergency lines. Fair enough. If almost getting shot down didn’t qualify as an emergency, what in blazes would?
Mogamedov kept checking the instrument panel, too. It didn’t seem to satisfy him … or he might have had trouble believing it. “The engines sound good, don’t they?” he said, as if by putting it in the form of a question he didn’t have to sound like someone who believed it.
“Pretty good.” Stas didn’t want to admit any more than he had to. A New Soviet Man ought not to believe in outmoded superstitions like tempting fate. Sometimes, though, the unreconstructed old Armenian peeked out from behind the New Soviet mask he wore.
Behind Mogamedov’s goggles, an equally unreconstructed old Azeri checked to make sure the 190 was really gone. So Stas thought, anyhow. He might have been wrong, but he didn’t think so.
Then bursts of flak, black with angry, fiery cores, began buffeting the Pe-2. In his wild efforts to escape the German fighter, Stas had come too close to the rings of antiaircraft guns girdling Minsk. He swung the plane hard to the south once more, away from the city.
“Where did the rest of the squadron get to?” Mogamedov asked.
“Good question. My guess is, we’re scattered over fifty kilometers of sky,” Stas answered. “As long as we see each other again back at the airstrip, we can worry about the details some other time.” Mogamedov thought that over, then nodded.
Off in the distance, a German stuck up his head to see what the French in front of him were up to. Aristide Demange took a shot at the Boche. He didn’t think he hit the con. He did make him disappear in a hurry, which was what he’d wanted to do.
He also hopped down off the firing step from which he’d fired. A few seconds later, the Fritzes turned loose a burst from a machine gun. Maybe all those rounds would have missed him. It was nothing he cared to find out by experiment.
A poilu coming into the trench from the smashed Belgian village behind it grinned sympathetically. “You were lucky, Lieutenant, getting down when you did,” the fellow said, his southern accent nasal and grating in Demange’s ears.
“Lucky, my left one,” Demange said, focusing his usual scorn for all humanity on one human in particular. “Listen, Marcel, I don’t care how stupid you are. Even a Provençal clodhopper like you should be able to see that, when you try and kill somebody, he’s gonna try to kill you, too. So maybe you shouldn’t give him the chance, eh?”
Marcel pondered that. Demange could see, or imagined he could see, the gears going round in the soldier’s head-going round … very … very … slowly. “D’accord,” Marcel said at last.
Demange suppressed the urge to clap a hand to his forehead in theatrical despair. The only thing that could have made Marcel act any dumber than he did now would have been for him to chew gum like a cow or an American. The worst of it was, Demange couldn’t ride him as hard as he would have liked. When it came to smarts, Marcel wasn’t the highest card in the deck, no. But he was easygoing and he fought all right. You didn’t expect or even want brains in all the privates.
The ruined village in back of them was the one that had been in front of them a few weeks before. They didn’t need to measure their advance in centimeters per day, but they didn’t need to measure it in kilometers per day, either. At this rate, they’d cross the Low Countries and push on into Germany about when Demange died of old age.
Of course, if he stayed at the front, old age was the least of his worries. He didn’t take idiotic chances, the way fools fresh from basic training and hotheads did. He remembered that the sons of bitches on the other side carried rifles and other tools of mayhem. The less they got to use them on him, the better he liked it.
Some chances, though, you couldn’t help. If some fat general’s secretary told him she wouldn’t suck him off one morning, he was liable to order his brigade to attack the Germans out of sheer spite. That kind of shit never got into the history books. It happened all the time, though.
He stuck up his head to see if some frustrated German general whose secretary wouldn’t put out was going to get a regiment’s worth of the Führer’s finest slaughtered on account of pique. The Fritzes seemed quiet. Demange hadn’t come up in the place he’d fired from. He also didn’t stay up longer than a second or two. Yes, he knew the ropes.