“What did you do, then?”
“I didn’t do anything. It’s what the colonel asked me.” Hans-Ulrich explained just what that was.
Sergeant Dieselhorst stared at him. “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” he burst out, and then added several comments even more pungent. Once he’d got those out of his system, he asked, “And what did you answer?”
“I said I didn’t know whether I could do it or not.”
“Huh.” The sergeant eyed him thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you one thing, so you know. If they ever give you orders like that, I sure as hell don’t want to sit in the back seat.”
“You’ll end up in all kinds of hot water if you try to refuse,” Hans-Ulrich pointed out.
“I understand that. Believe me, I do. I’ve been in the service a lot longer than you have.” Dieselhorst hawked and spat on the dirt near the Stuka’s tailwheel. Shaking his head, he went on, “I don’t think they’ll give you orders like that, though.”
“Why not? Why would they ask me something like that if they aren’t serious about it?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re serious about it. Matter of fact, I’m sure they’re crapping their drawers about it.” The veteran set a hand on Rudel’s shoulder. “But Colonel Steinbrenner asked you. If you aren’t the guy in the squadron who’s most loyal to the people in power, fuck me if I know who is. And you told him you weren’t sure you could bomb your own people. Suppose somebody who doesn’t like the Party so much takes his Stuka up. Where will he put his bombs? On the rebels? Or on the shitheads who tried to make him bomb them?”
“That would mean civil war!” Hans-Ulrich yipped.
“Very good,” Dieselhorst said, with the air of a teacher congratulating a short-pants kid who’d aced an exam. “But doesn’t it seem to you like we’ve already got a civil war? Why would they be asking you about bombing Germany if we didn’t?”
Hans-Ulrich opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He realized he had no good answer for that. He didn’t even have a bad answer for it.
Sergeant Dieselhorst patted him on the back. “You’re doing fine,” he said, still as teacher to student, or maybe more like father to son. The age difference between them wasn’t that large, but the difference in worldliness probably was. Dieselhorst went on, “Keep going down that road and you’ll make it to grown-up yet.”
“Oh, fuck you!” Hans-Ulrich shook off the sergeant’s hand. Dieselhorst laughed like a loon, which only irked the younger man more. He said, “You’re so smart, what would you have told the colonel if he asked you something like that?”
“You gave him a good answer. And he knows how honest you are, so he has to take it seriously,” Dieselhorst replied. “I might have said the same thing. Or I might have told him there’s no way I’d do anything against my own people, because there isn’t.”
“The SS might make you change your mind,” Hans-Ulrich remarked.
“Sir, the blackshirts can make anybody promise anything-I give you that,” Dieselhorst said. “But they can’t make you keep your promise once you take off. There’s no room in the cockpit for some asshole to hold his Luger to your head. They know it, too. They’re not all stupid. Only lots of them.”
That was also heresy or disloyalty or insubordination or whatever you wanted to call it. Or maybe it was just the attitude of a man who saw what he saw and knew what he knew and tried to get along as best he could.
“Like I say, sir,” he went on earnestly, “I don’t think it’ll come to that, honest to God. If you don’t want to start dropping bombs inside of Germany, nobody wants to.”
Was that faint praise? Or was it faint damn? Hans-Ulrich decided to take what he could get. “Thanks,” he said, and left it right there.
CHAPTER 18
Somewhere up ahead, there were Germans. Somewhere up ahead, there always seemed to be more Germans. Ivan Kuchkov had started to think the Hitlerites stamped out soldiers in a factory somewhere near Berlin. He shared the conceit with the men in his section. He gave them orders; they were stuck listening to him unless they really wanted to get the shit piled on their backs.
“They turn the fuckers on a lathe,” he said, warming to his story, “and then they spray on the gray uniforms the way we paint trucks.”
“I almost believe it, you know?” Sasha Davidov said.
“What? They don’t make kikes the same way?” Ivan gibed.
The scout shook his head. “Afraid not, Comrade Sergeant. If they did, there’d be more of us. No, we fuck like everybody else.”
“Like hell you do,” Kuchkov said. “You’ve got those clipped cocks. Probably shortens the recoil when your gun goes off.”
As the Red Army men laughed, Davidov said, “I knew there had to be some kind of reason for it.” He didn’t sound pissed off or anything. That was good. Ivan had no use for him as a Jew, but he made a damn fine point man. And somebody who could see trouble before it saw him was a better life-insurance policy than even a full drum on your PPD.
“Where was I?” the sergeant went on. “Oh, yeah. They machine the fucking Fritzes. They paint the uniforms on the cunts. And then … You guys ever seen a bottle factory? One where the bottles trundle by on a fucking belt and this machine stamps the caps on ’em, bang, bang, bang? You know what I’m talking about, assholes?” He waited for them to nod, then finished, “Well, that’s how Hitler’s pricks get the helmets on their knobs.”
“It’s cheap work,” Sasha said. “A bullet goes right through one of those things.”
Kuchkov picked up his own helmet. While he wasn’t in action, he just wore a forage cap. He hefted the ironmongery. “Sure, bitch. And this’ll keep out everything up to a goddamn 105, right?”
Sasha Davidov didn’t answer. Everybody knew a German helmet was better than the Soviet model. Ivan had had that thought himself, too many times to count. Never mind the steel-even the leather and pads that made the thing tolerable to wear-were of higher quality than their Red Army equivalents. It was such a fucking shame that wearing one would make his own side put holes in it.
One of his men asked, “Comrade Sergeant, are you criticizing Soviet production?”
The guy was a new replacement. His name was Mikhail … Mikhail Something. Ivan couldn’t remember his surname or patronymic. But he knew danger when he heard it. “Not me,” he answered without missing a beat. “Nobody’s helmet keeps out bullets. Anything that could’d be so goddamn heavy, it’d make your stupid head fall off.”
He waited. Mikhail didn’t say anything else. The prick was on the lean side, and kind of pale. By the way he talked, he came from Moscow. Piece by piece, none of that meant anything. But when one of your boys shot a political officer … The NKVD could build a case any way they pleased.
Sasha Davidov sat there by the fire, not quite looking at Ivan. The skinny little Zhid’s cheeks hollowed more than usual when he sucked in smoke from a papiros. He needed a shave. The dark stubble on his cheeks and his big nose made him look like a blackass from the Caucasus.
Jews were different, though. Get in trouble with a blackass and he’d come after you and cut your liver out. Get in trouble with a Jew and two years later you’d be in a camp somewhere north of the Arctic Circle and never quite sure how you wound up there. Jews liked revenge cold, not hot.
But they and blackasses had one thing in common. They were mostly too goddamn smart for their own good. Sasha could see that this Mikhail was trouble, same as Kuchkov could. And the two of them had been together for a long time now. Sasha could probably see what Kuchkov had in mind to do about it, too.
Whatever the Jew saw, he didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t even raise a dark, ironic eyebrow. He just sat there, leaning toward the flames and smoking the papiros till he’d burnt every milligram of tobacco in the paper cigarette holder.