To his surprise, Davidov didn’t drink at all. He just smoked papiros after papiros, cupping them in his hands to keep the rain from dousing them. The Jew didn’t play teetotaler all the time, so Kuchkov asked him, “What’s up with you?”
“I don’t want to miss anything, that’s all,” Davidov answered. “Maybe I wouldn’t with the vodka in me, but maybe I would, too. I’ll drink plenty after we get back-you can bet your dick on that.”
Hearing mat from him made Ivan laugh. “We’re all betting our dicks,” he said, and then, “When we grab the fucking Fritzes, you can palaver with ’em, right? I mean, you’re a Zhid, so you know Yiddish, don’t you?”
“Yes, Comrade Sergeant,” the point man said patiently. “It’s not the same as German, but it’s not as different as Ukrainian is from Russian. If they don’t kill me, they’ll understand me well enough.”
“Bugger shit-eating Ukrainian,” said Kuchkov, who’d heard more of it down here than he’d ever wanted to listen to. He didn’t notice Davidov’s irony till they were sneaking out toward the German lines. Too late to do anything about it then.
He couldn’t see more than a few meters. He couldn’t hear more than a few meters, either; the rain took care of that. If Mauser rounds cracked past, or if one of the nasty machine guns the Russians called Hitler’s saws started spitting bullets twice as fast as a Maxim gun could, he figured he’d notice that.
Through the rain, Davidov called, “Wire here! Hold up while I cut it.” He pitched his voice perfectly to reach his Red Army comrades and go no farther. Ivan hoped like hell he did, anyway. After a minute (and, presumably, after some snipping Ivan couldn’t hear), the Jew said, “All good now. This way-toward my voice.”
Kuchkov sliced the back of his hand on a barb from the cut wire. He cussed furiously under his breath. “Maybe you’ll get lockjaw, Comrade Sergeant,” one of the Russians said. “What would you do then?” The other raiders all laughed-quietly, but they did. Ivan couldn’t even think about revenge till later. The Red Army men crawled on.
“Hold up!” Davidov hissed urgently from out in front. “I can hear Germans talking.” Kuchkov cocked his head to one side. He still heard no Fritzes. Maybe the point man had stayed alive as long as he had not least because his ears were better than other people’s.
Kuchkov crawled forward. “Where are the dicks?” he asked. The Jew pointed. Ivan could barely make out his arm in the rainy gloom. He knew what he had to do now, though. He held his PPD a little tighter. Odds were it had got muddy. Well, it would work even so. German Schmeissers were much better made, but mud and grit in the works and they turned up their toes.
The Red Army men slithered closer. Now Ivan could hear the Fritzes, too. He couldn’t understand them, but they didn’t sound worried. They had no idea enemy soldiers were in the neighborhood. “Grenades!” he called to his men. “Grenades, and then we rush. Don’t shoot too fucking much. Remember, we gotta bring a couple of these bitches back alive.”
They would remember as long as remembering didn’t put their asses on the line. He was sure of that. He felt the same way. No German ever born-not even a blonde with big tits and legs up to there-was worth getting killed for.
“On three,” he said. “One … Two … Three!” Grenades flew. They burst all around the Germans (not busty blondes, he was sure-too bad!) the Russians wanted to grab. “Urra!” the Red Army men yelled as they dashed forward and jumped down into the Nazis’ fieldworks.
“Hande hoch!” Davidov screamed. Ivan was disappointed. He could sprechen that much Deutsch himself. But he couldn’t have followed the terrified babble that came back. The point man could, and did: “They surrender. They just want us not to kill them.”
“Tell ’em we won’t. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Kuchkov said. What the NKVD interrogators would do to the Fritzes once they had them … wasn’t his worry. No, that would be for the Feldgrau boys to sweat.
The other Germans came back to life in a hurry. They were pros, all right, damn them. Machine-gun tracers hissed through the wet air. But the Hitlerites fired just a little high. When you were down as flat as your buttons would let you get, a few centimeters mattered. And the captured Germans did their best impressions of squashed snakes, too. They didn’t want their own friends punching their tickets for them by mistake.
Then Ivan had to worry about his friends punching his ticket for him. He knew too well the Russians were capable of it. Yes, they knew he’d gone raiding. Yes, they expected (or at least hoped) he’d come back. They might open up anyway.
But they didn’t. After some soldiers hauled the miserable Fritzes away, Lieutenant Novikov pounded Ivan on the back. “I’ll get you a medal for this,” he said happily-his behind would have been in a sling had the raid failed.
“If it’s all the same to you, Comrade Lieutenant, I’d rather have a blowjob,” Ivan answered. “Or at least some extra vodka.”
Novikov let out a startled yip of laughter. “The vodka I can arrange. You’re on your own for getting your dick sucked.” Kuchkov nodded. That was how things worked, all right. The really good stuff, you had to grab for yourself.
Hideki Fujita stood at stiff attention before Captain Ikejiri. Anything less than stiff attention would have doomed him before he started. Even by Japanese Army standards-some of the highest in the world-Masanori Ikejiri was a stickler for discipline. “Yes, Sergeant?” he said now. “You wish …?” By his tone, he wished Fujita would dry up and blow away.
But Ikejiri acted as if he wished every enlisted man ever hatched would dry up and blow away. So Fujita didn’t let that worry him-too much. He saluted with mechanical precision. “Please, Captain-san, I would like to be placed in a position where I see more action,” he said. He’d thought about calling Ikejiri Captain-sama-Lord Captain-but decided that would be laying it on too thick even for the self-important officer.
“Oh, you would, would you?” Now Ikejiri sounded as if he had trouble believing his ears.
“Hai, Captain-san!” Fujita saluted again, then resumed his posture of respect.
Captain Ikejiri rubbed his chin. “Well, I don’t hear that one every day,” he allowed. “Most of the time, people come in here to ask me to put them in slots where they don’t go into harm’s way.”
“Sir, I serve the Emperor. I want to serve the Emperor, may he live ten thousand years. I want to serve him the best way I can.” All of which was true. Fujita didn’t say he was bored green in Myitkyina, although that was just as true if it wasn’t even more so.
“Well, your attitude does you credit.” From Ikejiri, that was no small praise. He glanced down at some papers on the little table that did him duty as a desk. My service record, Fujita realized. The captain continued, “No one can complain about your performance since you came to Burma.”
That was why Fujita was a sergeant again. His performance in China, on the other hand, had got him demoted and made the powers that be approve his request for a transfer as soon as he handed it in. If you fouled up, you would pay for it. And he had, and he’d come to this miserable place to atone for fouling up. Now he’d managed that, too. Having managed it, he wanted more, as people have a way of doing.
“You realize, if you see more action, the Chinese will shoot at you?” Captain Ikejiri said.
“Sir, you will know I fought the Russians on the Mongolian border and in Siberia.” Fujita couldn’t sound affronted before an officer, but he wanted to. “After them, I hope I’m not going to hide under the bed on account of the Chankoro.” He brought out the scornful Japanese slang for Chinks without even noticing he did it. Japan had been taking what she wanted and needed in China ever since the end of the nineteenth century. The Chinese almost always gave way before Japan’s might. When they didn’t, they almost always lost. No wonder Japanese soldiers scorned them and their fighting skills.