“Fucking ’ell,” the thwarted footballer snarled. Theo didn’t speak English, but he recognized an endearment when he heard one. He smiled sweetly.
As the two sides jostled each other before the kick, his own teammates thumped him on the back. “That’s the way to play it,” Adi Stoss said. “You couldn’t have done any better.”
“Thanks,” Theo muttered. Praise on the pitch from Adi was praise indeed. As usual, the panzer driver seemed to be in his own world here. He far outshone his countrymen. He far outshone his opponents, too, and the English had invented the game. He’d already scored once, and only a leaping, sprawling save by the other ’keeper kept him from claiming another goal.
The Tommies did the same thing other German sides did: they tried to knock him off his game by knocking him around. Nasty tackles sent him sprawling a couple of times. In a professional match, they would have got the guilty parties sent off. If nobody needed an ambulance here, you just kept playing.
Adi was no fool. He could tell which way the wind blew. He’d probably known it would blow his way long before it did. And he took care of things on his own. One of his tormentors went down in a heap and didn’t get up again for a long time. At last, when Theo was starting to wonder if they would need an ambulance, the Englishman staggered to his feet and play went on. A few minutes later, another Tommy skidded a long way on his face. He rose with blood running from his nose, looking for a fight. Adi stood right there. If the fellow in khaki wanted one, he could have it. He decided he didn’t want it. The match resumed once more.
At last, the English lieutenant serving as timekeeper and referee blew his officer’s whistle. Play ground to a stop. The Landsers had beaten the Tommies, 5-3. A few of the Englishmen seemed amazed they could lose at their own game, even in a pickup match like this. A couple of others seemed furious. Most, though, were as winded as their German counterparts. They and the Germans clapped one another on the back, clasped hands, and tried to talk, using fragments-often foul fragments-of their opponents’ language.
On the sidelines, cash and chattels personal-especially tobacco and liquor-changed hands as bettors settled up. One of the Germans who seemed to have done well for himself went up to Adi. Whatever he said didn’t sit well with Theo’s crewmate. Stoss turned away, obviously angry.
The other German said something else. Adi snarled something in return. Theo trotted over to them, ready for anything. You didn’t let your buddies down, on the battlefield or on the pitch.
But the fellow who’d infuriated Adi didn’t want to bang heads. He just looked bewildered at what he’d started. “You can clear off, pal,” he said to Theo. “I didn’t mean to get him mad at me.”
“Oh, yeah?” Theo only half-believed that. On the one hand, nobody in his right mind would want Adi Stoss mad at him. The Englishman with the bloody nose had seen that. He’d backed off, too. On the other hand, Adi wasn’t a guy with a short fuse. He didn’t go looking for trouble or start it. He didn’t get sore for no reason at all, either.
Or did he? The other German said, “Yeah. Honest to God. All I said was, he played as well as the last time I saw him on the pitch.”
“Liar,” Adi said, and if that wasn’t murder in his voice, Theo had never heard it.
“I don’t think so.” Theo might have heard the danger in his voice, but the other fellow plainly didn’t. He went on, “I was selling stuff in Munster three, four years ago, and Bayern Munchen was playing a friendly against some town side-the Foresters, that’s who they were. I’m from Munich, so I went. I remember you ’cause you were the only good thing on the pitch for your club.”
Adi shook his head. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but that wasn’t me.”
“Right.” The man from Munich didn’t believe it for a second. “Then it was either your twin or your ghost-that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”
“Could have been either one,” Adi said. “All I’ve got to tell you is, it wasn’t me.”
“Huh!” No, the stranger wasn’t convinced. But what could he do in the face of such stubborn, stony denial? Walk off shaking his head, was the only thing that occurred to Theo. And that was just what the fellow from Munich did.
Adi Stoss swore, loudly and foully. He kicked at the half-frozen ground under his feet. “Now I can’t even play fucking football any more,” he muttered.
“Don’t worry about it.” Words never came easily for Theo. He found a few more anyway: “He’s from Munich, not Munster. Whatever you’re running from, he doesn’t know anything about it.”
Sudden hard suspicion filled Adi’s voice: “Why do you think I’m running from anything?”
He’d been ready to kill the guy from Munich. He’s liable to want to murder me, too, Theo realized. And, all things considered, how can you blame him? He picked his next words with even more care and reluctance than he usually used: “It’s not like half the guys in the company don’t already know.”
“Know what?” Stoss demanded.
This time, Theo didn’t say a word. He glanced toward the crotch of Adi’s black coveralls, held his eyes there long enough to make sure the driver noticed him doing it, and then looked away.
Adi was swarthier than most Germans. That didn’t keep him from going white now. “You… know?” he whispered.
“ ’Fraid so,” Theo answered.
“And you didn’t turn me in to the Gestapo or the SD or the rest of those pigdogs?”
“Oh, sure I did. Six months ago. The rest of the panzer guys have done it dozens of times,” Theo said, deadpan.
Stoss stared. For a second, maybe a second and a half, he believed Theo. He didn’t know whether to clout him with a rock, look around frantically for blackshirts, or just start running. Then he realized he’d tripped over irony. “You son of a bitch!” he said, and he couldn’t have sounded more relieved if the Panzer II’s armor had just held out a burst of machine-gun fire. “You son of a bitch! Maybe the whole world’s not out to ruin us after all.” He didn’t say which us the world was after, but Theo hadn’t, either. They both knew, all right.
Chapter 25
Things weren’t going well for the Soviet Union. The news broadcasts from Moscow did their best to disguise that, and their best was surprisingly good. Had Anastas Mouradian not been a frontline fighter, he never would have realized how rotten things looked.
But he was, and he did. It wasn’t even that the front kept moving east. The USSR was an enormous place. Trading space for time was an old Russian strategy, and now a new Soviet one. The way the Red Army and Red Air Force were making the trade, though…
Stas heard much more about all the Devil’s relations than he wanted to. Bad language about them filled the military frequencies. Among Russians, that was a sure-fire sign things were badly buggered up. And generals and colonels kept getting replaced, one after another. Nobody said anything about what happened to the men who were relieved. Mouradian could draw his own pictures. They weren’t pretty, which didn’t mean they weren’t true.
The replacements came in and gave enthusiastic orders. The Germans and the allies they’d seduced into campaigning against Socialism kept gaining ground regardless. In weeks or days or sometimes hours, the enthusiastic replacements got replaced themselves. Some of them probably didn’t even know why they went into the gulags, which didn’t stop them from going.
There were times-there were quite a few times, in fact-when Mouradian was glad to be only a lowly lieutenant. All he had to do was follow orders from above. As long as he did that, he was safe-well, as safe as any Soviet frontline fighter. He just had to worry about the Nazis and their allies. He didn’t have to worry that the NKVD would blame him for the next unauthorized retreat.
Josef Stalin spoke on the radio, something he seldom did. “Workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, you must not take one step farther back,” he declared. His Georgian accent was thicker than Mouradian’s Armenian intonations. Russians threw everybody from the Caucasus into the same pile. People from the Caucasus knew better. Georgia and Armenia bordered each other, but so what? Their peoples were as different as Magyars and Czechs. To them, it was obvious. To Russians… But what did Russians know? Georgians and Armenians were both dark, and both used peculiar alphabets nobody else could read. If that didn’t make them brothers… you weren’t a Russian.
“We must hold the enemy in place. The country is in danger,” Stalin went on. “Every wrecker and traitor we capture must and shall face the most severe punishment.”
Around Mouradian, heads in the squadron ready room solemnly bobbed up and down. Stas made himself nod, too, so as not to seem out of place. Anyone who paid attention to what he read and heard followed more than the mere words blaring out of the radio speaker. The most severe punishment was a government euphemism for execution, commonly by bullet in the back of the neck. And, by every wrecker and traitor, Stalin meant everyone who disagreed with him, even in the slightest or most trivial way. The show trials and purges before the war proved that.
“We shall fight for the Rodina! We shall fight for holy mother Russia!” Stalin declared. “Alexander beat Napoleon! Peter the Great beat the Swedes! We beat the Teutonic Knights-filthy, plundering Germans-when they invaded us! And our cause, the Russian cause, is just again! We will win again!”
Several of the flyers in the ready room banged their hands together and burst into cheers. The ones who did were Russians to a man.
As for Mouradian, he had to fight the impulse to dig a finger into his ear and see if the canal was clogged with wax. Stalin had mentioned the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union in his speech. He’d mentioned them, yes-and then he’d proceeded to forget all about them. Instead, he’d used as many symbols from Russian history as he could find. Not Soviet history-Russian. Stas had never dreamt he would hear a Soviet leader talk about holy mother Russia.
That Stalin himself was no more Russian than a Kazakh or an Uzbek obviously bothered the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR not at all. Holy mother Russia didn’t mean much to Stas Mouradian. That wouldn’t bother Stalin, either. Armenia was only a little place, jammed into the bottom left-hand corner of most maps. The vast expanse of Russia was the map.
Martial music thundered out of the radio. It wasn’t martial music Stas had heard before, which meant exactly nothing. Stalin had factories from here to Khabarovsk cranking out planes and tanks and guns and uniforms as fast as they could. He had swarms of collective farms cranking out food as fast as they could (and if he had to starve millions of people to force more millions to labor on those farms, he’d proved he would do that without batting an eye). Of course he would have conservatories full of composers cranking out martial music as fast as they could. If the composers didn’t feel like serving the Soviet Union that way, what would they do then? They’d start de composing, that was what.
And the crazy thing was, the martial music worked. By the time the piece finished, Mouradian wanted to belt somebody in the chops-by choice, somebody in a field-gray uniform and a coal-scuttle helmet. He understood that he was being manipulated. Understanding it and being able to stop it were as different as tea and tobacco.
The squadron CO was, not surprisingly, a Russian. The Soviet Union held as many Russians as all its other peoples put together. And the USSR had sprung up like a flower fertilized by the Russian Empire’s corpse (some would say, like a vulture feeding on the Russian Empire’s corpse, but not-usually-Mouradian). It was no surprise that Russians still ran so much of the USSR. Depressing, sometimes, but no surprise.
Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky waited till the last strains of the brand-new martial composition had faded away. Then he stood up and said, “You all heard Comrade Stalin’s brilliant speech. He promised the Soviet people victory. We are going to deliver that victory, Comrades. We are going to use our wonderful new airplanes-the finest products of Soviet science and engineering-to show the Fascist hyenas and their plutocratic lackeys hell on earth. Less than the sons of bitches deserve, too.”
As the flyers had nodded for Stalin, so they nodded for the squadron leader. Anastas Mouradian made sure he wasn’t behindhand there. All the same, he got the feeling Tomashevsky hadn’t listened to the General Secretary so closely as he might have. Tomashevsky talked about the Soviet people, about Soviet science and engineering. That had been the Party line for a long time. By the way Stalin talked today, though, the line was changing. Stalin talked about Tsar Alexander and Peter the Great, about Russian victories over invaders from the west.
Stas had heard rumors that people in the northwestern Ukraine were welcoming the Germans and their allies as liberators. He didn’t know if the whispers were true. But anyone who repeated a story like that took his life in his hands. Stas did know the Ukrainians had little reason to love Stalin or the Soviet government, not after the way they were starved by hecatombs during collectivization. After that, even the Nazis might look good by comparison.
“Today, we fly against Velikye Luki,” the squadron commander continued. “The Poles and the French are staging through there, building up for an attack farther east. Our mission is to strike the train station and the railroad yards.” He paused, then asked, “Questions?”
“What are the German defenses like, Comrade Colonel?” Mouradian said. Even if the Poles and French were coming through Velikye Luki, the fighters above the place and the antiaircraft guns inside would be operated by Germans. He was as sure of that as made no difference.
Tomashevsky only shrugged. “It does not matter. We are to strike the city regardless.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Mouradian replied. Maybe the squadron commander had no idea what was waiting for them. Or maybe the Germans were loaded for bear. Before long, everybody would find out which.
Even if the Luftwaffe had Bf-109s patrolling over Velikye Luki, Stas knew he might get away anyhow in a Pe-2. He wondered how Sergei Yaroslavsky and the Chimp were doing in that ancient SB-2. Pretty soon, with any luck at all, they’d start flying the more modern bomber, too.
After his bold question, the mission turned out to be… a mission. Bf-109s did fly above occupied Velikye Luki, but not in swarms. There was a lot of ground fire, but there wasn’t a lot of ground fire. He watched in dismay as one bomber in the formation fell out of the sky and cometed groundward trailing flame and smoke. A couple of shell fragments clanged against his plane’s aluminum skin, but they did no damage he could find.
At Ivan Kulkaanen’s command, Sergeant Mechnikov let the bombs fall free. Stas could only hope they landed on the target or close to it. Bombing from 6,000 meters was not an exact science. You aimed them as best you could, you dropped them, and you got the hell out of there. Stas had sat in Kulkaanen’s seat. He knew how hard the job was. Once you landed, you made the after-action report sound good. That was also part of the job. Yes, another mission, all right. And how many more still to come?