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?
Harbin held enough Japanese settlers to keep a daily newspaper in business. Copies came down to Pingfan, sometimes on the day they were printed, sometimes the day after. The local rag would never run the Yomiuri Shinbun out of business, but Hideki Fujita read it avidly just the same. Along with the radio, it helped remind him that there was a world beyond Shiro Ishii’s bacteriological-warfare camp.
He needed the reminder, too. When you dealt with maruta every day, when you sent them into the secret center compound and they never came out again, you really did start thinking of them as logs. The other choice was remembering that they were human beings, even if they were Russians or Chinese. Considering the kinds of things that happened to them in there (Fujita neither knew nor wanted to know the details: the broad outlines were more than bad enough), they would have been better off if they were made of wood.