“Bozhemoi!” Yaroslavsky said. “I tried to tell you-”
“No, not the camps.” Anastas’ joke had worked almost too well. “Far Eastern Aviation. They’ll make me a pilot so the Japanese can shoot me down.”
“Oh.” Yaroslavsky kissed him on both cheeks and gave him a hug. “Well, stay as safe as you can, you crazy bastard. I hope I see you after the war.”
“That would be good. Or maybe we won’t have to wait so long. Who knows? Who knows anything nowadays?” Mouradian slung the duffel over his shoulder and went out into the cold again.
The stone-faced noncom drove the panje wagon, too. With its boatlike body and big wheels, the wagon could get through winter snow and spring and autumn mud that stymied fancier transport.
For a wonder, the Germans hadn’t hit the railway station. The young lieutenant who’d taken over for the civilian stationmaster gave Mouradian a seat in a second-class compartment. Mouradian shrugged. He could have got a hard bench instead. “You’ll go out at twenty-three minutes past nine,” the lieutenant told him.
He was impressed at the precision. The train actually rattled out of the station a little past noon. That left Mouradian and the other officers in the compartment resigned but hardly surprised. Only a fool or a German would expect a schedule and reality to have much to do with each other.
They shared bread and sausages and cigarettes and vodka. They told dirty jokes. Most of them were going on leave. They sent Mouradian pitying glances when they found out he wasn’t. “Siberia!” one of them said. “That’s a devil of a long way from here. From everywhere, in fact.”
“I serve the Soviet Union,” Mouradian said one more time. Here, the stock phrase meant I’m stuck with it.
“Don’t we all, pal? Don’t we all?” said a Red Army lieutenant who seemed to have more booze than he knew what to do with. So he shared with everyone else in the compartment. It was samogan -moonshine-but it was good samogan, as good as some of the legitimate (which is to say, taxed) firewater Mouradian had drunk. The army man was genially tipsy, too. He kept coming out with one funny, outrageous crack after another.
The rest of the passengers laughed like loons. Pretty soon, they were making their own outrageous cracks… all of them but Stas. Maybe the Red Army man was what he seemed to be: a fellow with plenty of hooch and a quick tongue. Then again, maybe his proper arm-of-service color was NKVD blue. Maybe he was looking to build some cases.
He wouldn’t build one against Anastas Mouradian. Despite what Sergei said, Mouradian didn’t run his mouth all the time, or in the company of people he feared were provocateurs. And vodka didn’t make him lose his caution. Some Soviet citizens ended up in the gulag for talking too much while they were drunk. But the USSR had even more drunks than camp inmates. Plastered or not, most drunks knew how to keep their big mouths shut. And if that wasn’t a judgment on the Soviet system, Mouradian didn’t know what would be.
Back when he was conscripted, Luc Harcourt had never imagined he would be proud of the two brown hash marks on his sleeve that proclaimed him a corporal. All he’d wanted to do was put in his time and get the hell out. He was a normal draftee, in other words.
Things looked different when you got into a war. The nasty boys in field-gray were doing their damnedest to overrun your country-and, not too incidentally, to murder you. What seemed a waste of time when he could have been working and chasing girls in the peacetime civilian world was suddenly a rather more important business.
He was proud of commanding a machine gun, too, and that his subordinates thought he was doing a good job of it. Joinville was a small, swarthy, excitable Gascon. They called Villehardouin Tiny. In fact, he was enormous: big and strong and blond and fair. He hardly said anything, at least in French-he was much more at home in Breton. Joinville had learned some of it, and Luc was starting to pick it up. It made a good language to swear in.
Joinville carried the Hotchkiss machine gun. Tiny Villehardouin toted the tripod, which weighed a couple of kilos more. Other soldiers-just who could vary-lugged crates full of the aluminum strips of bullets that fed the Hotchkiss gun. Luc, as befitted his exalted rank, carried nothing… except when they couldn’t dragoon any privates into hauling whatever needed hauling. Then Luc took care of it. He’d been a private not so long before. He didn’t have much dignity to stand on. That was one of the reasons the other men who served the machine gun thought he made a pretty fair leader.
So did Sergeant Demange, who’d given him the slot after the poor fellow who had it became a casualty. Demange’s approval was worth having, especially if he was set over you. He was a professional noncom. He’d fought in the last war, and been wounded. A Gitane always hung from one corner of his mouth. It didn’t keep him from being fluently profane. The milk of human kindness ran thin and curdled in him; he was the most cynical man Luc had ever met.
“You can really handle that motherfucker,” he told Luc after a skirmish in which the Hotchkiss helped send the Germans off unhappy. “You see? You’re not quite the stupid, gutless asshole you were when you got sucked into the army.”
“Thanks a bunch, Sergeant,” Luc said, in lieu of Why don’t you suck this? He’d come far enough in his military career that he could sass Demange every now and again. He had to pick his spots, though, or he’d end up in the hospital, and not on account of the Boches.
“Any time, kid.” Demange grinned, showing teeth all those smokes had stained a nasty yellow-brown-if they weren’t that shade to begin with. He had to know what Luc was thinking. Mere thinking couldn’t land you in trouble… unless Demange felt like putting you there.
Artillery rumbled, off to the east. Whatever the Nazis were after, it was nothing close by. Nobody Luc knew would get hurt when those shells came down. Sometimes that seemed to be the only thing that mattered. When you were in the middle of it, war could get very tribal.
“We should have pushed them back farther,” Luc said discontentedly.
“No shit!” Demange exclaimed, the cigarette jerking up and down. “We should’ve given ’em the bum’s rush, is what we should’ve done.”
“How come we haven’t?” Luc wondered.
Demange rolled his eyes, which were always tracked with red. It made him look angry, which he was-or, if he wasn’t, he could have taken his act on stage. “How come? I’ll fucking tell you how come. On account of the Germans scare half our generals shitless, and a big chunk of the other half want to hop into bed with ’em so we can all fight the cocksucking Bolsheviks together.”
“That’d screw things up, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, just a little!” Demange spat out the butt, which was so short the coal almost singed his lips. He immediately took out the pack again. After he got a fresh one going, he grudgingly held out the pack to Luc.
“Thanks.” Luc took a smoke, then bent over and leaned close for a light. He was several centimeters taller than Demange, who intimidated the hell out of him even so. And no doubt the veteran noncom knew what he was talking about here. Every squad in the French army had a Communist or two in it. No matter what the right-wing generals-almost a redundancy-thought, the Reds wouldn’t be thrilled about fighting alongside the Nazis and against the fount of Marxism-Leninism.
Luc was no Communist. He didn’t want to fight alongside the Germans, either. They’d come too close to killing him too many times. They’d killed friends, and wounded others. He respected their skill; he didn’t think you could go up against Germans without quickly coming to respect it. All the same, as far as he was concerned, they made better enemies than allies.
Of course, a devil of a lot of generals felt that way about Russians. Sergeant Demange was right-they’d sooner go after the USSR than Germany. That, to Luc’s mind, was carrying things too far.
The wind wailed down off the North Sea. Snow swirled in it. It had been snowing in a halfhearted way all morning long. Now anything more than a few meters away vanished behind that thick white cloak. Luc shivered in his greatcoat. The wind didn’t seem to know it was there.