His breath smoked as he walked to his SB-2. Fur and leather flying togs kept him warm enough. Like most men lucky enough to have such gear, he also wore it a lot on the ground. Winter was just coming on, but in Russia you always had to treat it with respect.
Ivan Kuchkov waited for him and Vladimir Federov. “So-the motherfucking supply dump, is it?” the bombardier said.
“That’s right,” Sergei answered. The noncoms got briefings of their own, of course. But Sergei had the feeling Sergeant Kuchkov would know what was what even if nobody said a word to him. How? The same way a wolf tracked an elk through the forest. The wolf knew what supper smelled like, and Kuchkov… Kuchkov knew what trouble smelled like.
Groundcrew men started up the engines. The props blurred into invisibility. Sergei and Federov eyed the gauges and went through the checklist with uncommon care. The SB-2 was coming to the end of its useful life. Not to put too fine a point on it, the SB-2 had come to the end of its useful life quite a while ago. But there still weren’t enough Pe-2s to go around, so the older machines kept flying.
Pilot and copilot nodded to each other and exchanged thumbs-ups. Everything looked all right. Fuel, oil pressure, hydraulics… As long as the airplane didn’t fall apart five thousand meters off the ground, they were good for another mission.
Sergei taxied down the long runway, lit, at the moment, by a handful of electric torches. Red lanterns marked the end of the bumpy, frozen dirt strip. He yanked back hard on the stick. It felt as if he were hauling the SB-2 into the air by the scruff of its neck. He wasn’t inclined to be fussy. As long as the beast got airborne, he wouldn’t complain.
“All right, Comrade Navigator,” he said to Federov. “Tell me how to get to this miserable Nazi supply dump.”
“We fly a course of 260 degrees at 300 kilometers an hour for forty-seven minutes-and then we start groping around like blind men, the way we always do,” replied the other man in the cockpit.
And that was about the size of it. You could make your course as precise as you pleased. You could measure your airspeed well. But you couldn’t be sure how hard the wind was blowing, or from which direction at any given moment. Your dead reckoning would probably put you somewhere close to your target. Finding it on a moonless night like this was liable to be a different story.
“Shall I stick my head out the window for a better look?” Sergei asked when he thought they were about where they were supposed to be.
“If you think it will help,” Federov answered.
The Nazis, or possibly the French imperialists, knew they were around. Antiaircraft fire started coming up from the ground. The tracers and bursts-scarlet and gold-were eerily beautiful. The old SB-2 shook in the air from a couple too close for comfort. But the gunners down below were firing more or less blind. The groundcrew men had painted the bomber’s underside matte black, to make it as hard as possible to spot from below.
Ivan Kuchkov’s voice floated forward through the speaking tube: “Where’s this supply cunt at, anyway?”
“I’m still looking. They hide them, you know.” Afterwards, Sergei felt silly for apologizing to a foul-mouthed supply sergeant. But that was afterwards. It seemed natural enough at the time.
Bombs started bursting down on the ground: red blooms of fire swallowed almost at once by smoke and dust. Were they landing on the dump, or were the aircrews dropping them at random so they could get the devil out of here? Sergei didn’t know. And then, all of a sudden, he did. One of the Soviet bombs must have hit the Germans’ ammunition store. Things down below started blowing up with great enthusiasm. The fireworks show, already spectacular, got ten times better. And, best of all, these pyrotechnics weren’t trying to knock the SB-2 out of the sky.
“ That’s where we unload!” Sergei and Federov said together.
Sergei steered the bomber toward the continuing coruscations down below. Kuchkov would hardly need the order to let the bombs fall free. Sergei tried to look every which way at once, and wished for eyes in the back of his head. He wouldn’t be the only pilot drawn by those blasts, and he didn’t want to run into any of the others.
Ducking down into the plane’s glazed nose, Federov peered through the bombsight. “Now, Ivan!” he shouted through the speaking tube.
“The bitches are fucking gone!” Kuchkov yelled back. Sergei felt the plane get lighter and friskier. He hauled the nose around and started back toward Soviet-held territory.
He hadn’t got very far when an antiaircraft shell slammed into the SB-2’s wing. Flame spewed forth and licked toward the fuselage. “Oh, fuck your mother!” he exclaimed, and then, his wits starting to work again, “Out! We’ve got to get out!” He yelled through the voice tube, too, to make sure Ivan knew.
And they had to hurry. The controls went from normal to mushy to nonexistent in nothing flat. The fire started invading the cockpit. He had to fight through flames to get out of his safety belt and down to the escape hole Federov had already used. He held his gloved hands and leather-covered arms in front of his face, trying to protect eyes and mouth. Maybe the flying suit was burning-or maybe that was his hide.
Then he was down and falling free. He hoped like hell the wind would put out the flames. He yanked the ripcord-and discovered his unfolding parachute was on fire above him. Only blackness below. Oh, it was a long way down!
Chapter 24
“Well, that’s fucked up.” Lieutenant Demange tried to speak with his usual savage satisfaction. In spite of himself, though, he sounded impressed.
“Oh, just a little,” Luc Harcourt agreed. The Germans had been so sure nothing could happen to their massive supply dump. As far as Luc could see, the Germans were always sure. The trouble was, the damned Boches weren’t always right.
A wan, watery sunrise through roiling clouds showed how very wrong they’d been here. Back before the shooting started, some expert or other had gravely warned, The bomber will always get through. Two years of fighting had proved that-surprise!-nothing would always do anything. But they also proved that almost anything would sometimes do something. And, this time, the Russian bombers had got through.
Smoke still rose from the devastated dump. Some of it stank of cordite-ammo of all sizes from small-arms to 155mm was still cooking off in there. The explosions-sometimes single spies, sometimes in battalions-made the dawn even more nervous than it would have been otherwise. And some of it smelled like the world’s biggest and worst stew forgotten on top of a fire: probably on top of a forest fire. How many rations were burning up a couple of kilometers away? Enough to turn a quartermaster sergeant irrational.
The Nazis had assigned several French-speaking officers as liaisons with their enemies-turned-allies. Listening to the guttural rendition of his language coming out of one of their mouths did nothing to reassure Luc. Neither did the officer’s arrogance, even if the German might have been more inclined to call it confidence.
“They got lucky,” the fellow in Feldgrau insisted. “The advance will go on as if they had not.”
“My left one,” Lieutenant Demange muttered, which pretty much summed up what Luc thought of the German’s declaration. Easier to advance when you had supplies than when you didn’t. That should have been obvious even to a Nazi.
And also easier to advance when it wasn’t so goddamn cold. At first, the Germans had been relieved when the ground froze. It let their tanks and halftracks and motorcycles and trucks move forward again instead of getting stuck in the mud every few meters.
But Russian cold didn’t know when to quit. The winter before had been as cold as any Luc had ever known in France. Now he’d decided he was only a beginner when it came to frigid winters. He also feared he wouldn’t be by the time he came home from Russia-if he ever did. Winters hereabouts were born knowing things their tamer cousins in Western Europe never learned.