And, while the Stukas kept the Russians who’d set the trap hopping, more German panzers raced around their flank. The Ivans skedaddled; they were always nervous about their flanks. Theo’s panzer company, or the survivors thereof, rolled past the village where they’d been held up. They didn’t roll through it, a plan Theo liked. Nobody knew for sure whether all the Red Army men had abandoned the place. They might be waiting in there with Molotov cocktails and antipanzer rifles and whatever other unpleasantnesses they could come up with.
German and Polish infantry tramped along behind the panzers. Before too long, the ground pounders would come through here and clear out whatever Russians remained behind. In the meantime, the panzers would motor ahead and bite out another chunk of territory for the infantry to clear.
This was how things worked when blitzkrieg ran according to plan. When things went wrong, you outran your infantry support and the enemy concentrated against you where you couldn’t outflank him. That had happened in France. There was a lot more space to play with in the Soviet Union. Maybe it wouldn’t happen here. Theo hoped not. He wanted to win. More than anything else, though, he wanted to go home.
Anastas Mouradian would have liked more training on the Pe-2 than he got. No matter what he would have liked, he and his classmates went into action as soon as they figured out the controls and took off and landed a few times.
He did have a better plane than he’d flown before. The SB-2 had been a fine bomber in its day, but its day was done. In a couple of years, no doubt, something newer and snazzier would also replace the Pe-2. Till then, Mouradian was happy to fly one against the Soviet Union’s enemies.
Was Sergei Yaroslavsky still hauling his old SB-2 around the sky? For his sake, his former bomb-aimer hoped not. The Pe-2 was close to a 150 kilometers an hour faster. It could fly higher and carry more bombs. All that meant it had a better chance of coming back from its missions.
Three of his classmates at the airstrip outside of Moscow never got the chance to fly the new bomber against the Nazis. One of them botched a takeoff and crashed-or maybe an engine failed. Either way, he was dead. So were the two who flew their planes into the ground instead of landing them. Flying was an unforgiving business. If the Germans didn’t get you, a moment’s carelessness and you’d do yourself in.
His bomb-aimer and copilot was a Karelian named Ivan Kulkaanen. He was as blond as Anastas was dark, and spoke Russian with an odd accent. “Don’t worry-I think you sound funny, too,” he told Mouradian.
“When I talk Russian, I know I sound funny,” Stas answered. “But you should hear me in Armenian.”
Whereupon Kulkaanen gabbled out a couple of sentences in what Mouradian presumed to be his native tongue. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to him. “Finnish,” the blond man explained.
“If you say so.” Mouradian couldn’t contradict him.
Back in the bomb bay was a Russian sergeant called Fyodor Mechnikov. Like the other bombardiers Stas had known, he was brawny and foul-mouthed. “They took me off a farm,” he said, his grin displaying several stainless-steel teeth. “I’ve got the muscle. I don’t scare easy. For the shit I do, who needs brains?”
“Can you read? Can you write?” Stas asked.
Mechnikov shook his bullet head. “Not a fucking word, sir,” he answered, not without pride.
“I’ll teach you if you want.”
“Nah.” Mechnikov shook his head again. “I’ve gone this long without it, I wouldn’t know what to do if I could all of a sudden. And I remember real good. I start writing shit down, I bet I start forgetting like a son of a bitch.”
He might well have been right. Stas had dealt with more than a few illiterate enlisted men in his time. Russia was full of them. In Western Europe, they said, almost everybody could read and write. It wasn’t like that here. And illiterates did tend to have better memories than people who could read and write. They needed them.
The newsreaders on the radio tried their best to give the impression that everything at the front was fine. Their best might have convinced civilians who hadn’t seen German soldiers or had German bombs fall on them yet. But if everything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe, why was the Red Air Force rushing half-trained Pe-2 pilots to the front as fast as it could?
Stas didn’t think anything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe. He never had. Soviet propaganda was primarily aimed at Russians, and Russians, as seen through the jaundiced eye of a man from the Caucasus, lacked a certain subtlety. So did Soviet propaganda, at least to Mouradian. Stalin was a man from the Caucasus, too. Chances were he chuckled cynically at the stuff he had his propagandists put out. Which didn’t mean the stuff didn’t work.
And the new bombers worked, too-at least if you didn’t crash them trying to get them to work. The pilots flew their planes and aircrews west toward the border between Russian and Byelorussia. That they landed at airstrips still inside the Russia Federation gave the lie to the swill that poured out of radio speakers. No, things weren’t going nearly so well as the Soviet government wanted people to think.
English and French reinforcements for the Nazis hadn’t got here yet, either. What would happen when they joined the Germans and Poles? Nothing good, not if you were a Soviet citizen.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky seemed to know his business. He wasn’t a drunken blowhard like Colonel Borisov or a hopeless loser like the fellow who’d briefly given Mouradian orders in the Far East.
“The Nazis are still coming forward,” he told the newly assembled men of his newly assembled squadron. He didn’t bother mentioning the Poles. In his place, Stas wouldn’t have, either. Tomashevsky went on, “We can’t stop them all by ourselves, but we can hurt them. That will give the Red Army a better chance to do its job.”
Was he saying the Red Army wasn’t doing its job? Would some political officer rake him over the coals for telling the truth? Such things happened all the time. That was a shame, but they did.
“One more thing,” he added. “The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union isn’t to try and dogfight the 109s. The Pe-2 may have started out as a heavy fighter, but it’s a bomber now. It’s a good bomber, but it’s still a bomber, dammit. The best way to become a Hero of the Soviet Union is to finish your mission, come back, and fly your next one and the one after that. That’s what heroes do: what needs doing. Go take care of it.”
Thus encouraged, they hurried to their planes. Antiaircraft guns’ snouts stuck up around the airstrip. Stas hadn’t seen any bomb craters, though. The Germans hadn’t found this place, then. Not yet.
Groundcrew men bombed up the squadron’s Pe-2s. Fyodor Mechnikov was ready. “Let’s blow the living shit out of these Nazi cunts,” he said.
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Stas replied.
Up they went. After the more sedate SB-2, takeoff in the new machine was like a kick in the pants. “I could get used to this,” Ivan Kulkaanen remarked.
“Let’s hope so,” Stas answered. Kulkaanen gave him a sidelong look. Stas didn’t know about Karelians in general-he hadn’t met many-but his bomb-aimer had an ear for the little things… if they were little. If the aircrew didn’t get used to these takeoffs, they’d probably be too dead to care.
They droned west. Orders were to hit the Germans outside of Mogilev, on the Dnieper. When they got there, they discovered the enemy was already ten or fifteen kilometers over the river. They bombed the biggest concentration of Germans they could find. Antiaircraft fire came up at them from the ground, but it wasn’t too bad. Mouradian had flown through plenty worse. No Messerschmitts seemed to be in the neighborhood. Nobody could anger Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky by pretending the Pe-2 still was the fighter it had originally been intended to be.