“Bloody hell,” Walsh said. As soon as he finished with this scrape, he was happy enough to stay here till, oh, 1953. Maybe the Boches would die of old age by then or something. Anything was better than changing that nest in broad daylight.
Anything … He whistled softly. “Wot yer got, Staff?” Scholes asked. He sounded sure Walsh had something. Coming up with things was what a staff sergeant was for-or he thought so, anyhow. In that, he differed little from the captain.
“Tell him we’ll try a night attack to settle them,” Walsh said.
“ ’E wants it done now,” Scholes said dubiously.
“Then he can take care of it himself, and I’ll write his next of kin a kind letter about what a brave bloke he was-if I’m still here to do the writing,” Walsh answered. “Tell him just like that. And say nights are still long-he won’t have to wait till ten o’clock for the show.”
“Oi’ll tell ’im.” Scholes snaked off again. This time, he didn’t come back. Walsh hoped that was because Captain Hammersmith saw reason, not because Scholes stopped something going back or moving forward. Since the captain didn’t order an attack on his own, Walsh thought he had some chance of being right.
The Fritzes stopped hosing down the landscape with bullets as twilight began to deepen. They were an orderly, predictable people-except when they went off the rails and started another world war, of course. They’d packed it in at dusk the night before, too, and the night before that. Nighttime was for rest and food, not for fighting. So they seemed to think, anyhow.
Most of the time, Walsh agreed with them. All kinds of horrible things could go wrong with a night attack. But at least you might take the Germans by surprise with one. And anything seemed better than rushing forward into the storm of lead. They’d tried that at the Somme, and lost a small city’s worth of dead the first day-which didn’t count the wounded, or what happened over the next few excruciating weeks. This would be a smaller slaughter, but not necessarily in proportion to the number of men engaged. Head-on slogging wouldn’t go. A night attack might. And so, a night attack it would be.
Walsh told off two attacking parties. Both would be armed with Sten guns. They’d need to get close, and they’d need to throw around a lot of bullets when they did. They had Mills bombs, too, lots of them, and a bazooka for whatever bunker-busting they’d need to do.
And they had compasses with radium-painted needles that glowed in the dark. With luck, they’d get close to where they were supposed to go. Without luck … Without luck, the captain or someone else would write Walsh’s kin one of those kind letters. Or maybe they’d just get a wire from the Ministry of War.
He didn’t worry about that. He worried about getting where he was going in spite of the cold, nasty drizzle that started coming down. The Germans who served those MG-42s would be nice and dry. They might even be warm. All the more reason to hate the buggers.
Once your eyes got used to it, you could see amazingly well in the dark. Not fine details, no, but plenty well enough to get around. Well enough to navigate, too, if you were careful. And the rain’s dank dripping kept the Germans in their nests from hearing the enemy coming until he was right on top of them.
That turned out to be literally true. Walsh stuck the muzzle of his Sten into the Germans’ firing slit and emptied the whole magazine. The screams that came from inside were at least as much from shock and horror as from pain. He yanked the pin off a grenade and chucked that through the slit, too. One of his men added another. That took care of that.
It did for one MG-42, anyhow. The Germans in the other position fired off a flare and started shooting at whatever the hateful white light showed. But, because of the rain, it didn’t show as much as usual. It also didn’t alert their friends farther back that they were in trouble. And some of the Tommies had already got round behind the second machine-gun nest. They quickly finished it with grenades and submachine guns.
They threw off enough sandbags to get into the nests, plunder the dead, carry off the machine guns, and booby-trap the positions with trip wires and Mills bombs. Then they got out of there. “ ’Ere you go, Staff.” Jack Scholes handed Walsh a prize: a tube of liver paste. “An’ if anyfing’ll ’appy up the captain, loike, this ’ere little game will.”
“If anything will,” Walsh said. “For a little while.” Scholes laughed. Walsh wished he’d been joking.
When a Pe-2 taxied to takeoff, the engines stayed pretty quiet. When you gave them full throttle to get airborne, the roar filled your head. Anastas Mouradian wore a leather flight helmet. He had earphones so he could hear radio messages from his squadron commander and fellow flyers. The roar filled his head anyhow. It seemed to swallow him whole. He often marveled that it didn’t shake his molars right out of his jaw.
By the way Isa Mogamedov’s lips drew back from his teeth as the bomber started its climb, the Azeri was feeling the same way. Seeing Stas’ eyes on him, he said something.
Whatever it was, that all-consuming roar made it unintelligible. Stas cupped a hand behind his ear to show he didn’t get it. Mogamedov obligingly tried again. He shouted and used exaggerated mouth movements so the pilot could read his lips: “Poland this time.”
“Da.” Mouradian nodded to show he’d heard. “We’re moving forward.” He also mouthed the words, feeling much like a ham actor as he did. There were things he didn’t say, too. For instance, he didn’t remark on how long it had been since the squadron could bomb any country other than the USSR. When you said something like that, you put your life in the hands of the person to whom you said it.
Yes, a bomber pilot and copilot/bomb aimer already had their lives in each other’s hands. But that was different. If the Germans-or even the Poles-got one of them, they’d get both of them. The NKVD could pick and choose. Better, far better, not to give the Chekists the chance.
Flak came up at the Pe-2s. Mouradian’s plane bounced in the air like a truck rattling over a rutted road. But no clangs told of steel ripping through the thin aluminum skin. All the gauges stayed steady. The Germans still held part of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The Red Army hadn’t cleared them out of Latvia and Lithuania yet, either.
But the Pe-2s could hit Poland even so. They could, and they would. Marshal Smigly-Ridz needed to be reminded there was a price for choosing Hitler over Stalin. The Soviet Union had already paid an enormous price because Smigly-Ridz didn’t care to cough up Wilno when Stalin demanded it. That was one more of the things you said to nobody unless you happened to own a death wish.
On they droned. It was a longer flight than most, so Stas kept a wary eye on the fuel gauge. They’d have plenty to get where they were going and back again unless something went wrong. He eyed the gauge anyhow. Getting hit was the most likely way for something like that to go wrong, but far from the only one. A cracked line, a clogged line … The longer you’d been flying, the more possibilities like that you could think of.
He and Mogamedov both spent a lot of their time peering out every which way at once through the cockpit glass. Bf-109s, FW-190s, whatever outdated junk the Poles were flying-if you didn’t spot them before they saw you, you’d go down in flames before you could complain about how obsolete the fighters were. Stas wished he had eyes on stalks like a crawfish so he really could look in two directions at the same time.
The squadron commander’s voice sounded tinnily in his earphones: “That’s Wilno dead ahead. We’ll aim at the railroad yards and the steel mills.”
Railroad connections and factories had made Stalin want the town in the first place. Now his minions would try to wreck them. If you thought about it, it reminded you of a spoiled five-year-old. If I can’t have them, you don’t get to use them, either! The scary thing was, that was probably just what was going through Stalin’s beady little mind.