Here and there, off in the distance, rifle shots and occasional bursts of machine-gun fire marred the night's stillness. The Russians were supposed to have been cleared out of this stretch of Poland, no matter what was going on farther south. Some of them hadn't got the word, though. They didn't fight with a great deal of skill, but they had no quit in them.
In due course, Theo woke Adi Stoss. He jumped back in a hurry, because Adi came awake with a trench knife in his hand. "Oh. It's you," the driver said then, and made the knife disappear.
"Me," Theo agreed.
Adi yawned and sat up. "Anything going on?"
"Nothing close."
"That's all that matters," Stoss said.
"Ja." Theo hesitated. He thought he had a better chance talking to the driver than to the panzer commander… and Naumann lay a few meters away, snoring like a sawmill. "You ought to take it easy on Heinz. He doesn't like it when you give him grief."
"You think I have fun when he rides me?" Stoss returned.
"He's a sergeant," Theo said, as if that explained everything. If you'd been in the army for even a little while, it damn well did.
"I don't care if he's a fucking field marshal," Adi answered. "Nobody's going to call me a kike."
So that still rankled, did it? Theo didn't suppose he should have been surprised. "He didn't mean anything by it," he said.
"Ha!" One syllable carried a tonne's weight of disbelief.
Theo gave it up. He didn't know what else he could do. "Just be careful," he said.
"Ja, Mutti," Adi answered indulgently. Yes, Mommy chased Theo under his blanket, as Stoss had no doubt intended it to do.
Dawn came early. Black bread spread with butter from a tinfoil tube and ersatz coffee made a breakfast of sorts. Heinz Naumann, who'd had the last watch, turned to Theo and said, "See if we've got any new orders. Or are they just going to have us sit here with our thumbs up our asses?"
"I'll find out," Theo said. Climbing back into the panzer felt good. So did putting on the earphones and hooking into the radio net. Like anyone else, Theo enjoyed doing things he was good at, and Wehrmacht training made damn sure he was damn good at using the panzer's radio set.
When he stuck his head out of the hatch in front of the engine compartment, Heinz barked, "Well?"
"We're ordered to motor back to the railhead at Molodetschna," Theo reported. "Further orders when we get there."
"Himmeldonnerwetter!" Naumann burst out. "Why'd we come all the way up here, then? A round trip to fucking nowhere, with the chance of getting shot or blown up thrown in for a bonus!"
"Gasoline at the railhead?" Stoss put in. "We've got enough to get there-I think so, anyhow-but not much more than that."
"Wunderbar," Heinz said sourly. "What do we do if we run dry? Hoof it?"
"See if we can get a tow, if we're close," Adi answered. "If we can't… Well, d'you want to stick around?"
"Here? Christ, no!" Heinz said. Theo felt the same way. There were stories about what the Reds did to Germans they caught. Theo didn't know if those stories were true, and he didn't want to find out, either. He slid back into the Panzer II. The other crewmen also came aboard. The reliable little Maybach engine fired up right away. Off they went, back in the direction they'd come from. THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT EYED VACLAV JEZEK with what might have been sympathy. He gargled something in his own language. Vaclav looked back blankly. He didn't understand a word. Even if he had, he wouldn't have let on.
Benjamin Halevy turned French into Czech: "He wants your antitank rifle. They're obsolete, he says. They don't penetrate the armor of the latest German tanks."
"Tell him no," Vaclav said at once. The heavy weight on his right shoulder, the recoil bruises that never got a chance to heal up, had become a part of him.
More French from the lieutenant. He couldn't just demand; Vaclav was a foreign ally, not somebody under his direct command. "He wants to know why you're so enamored of an outmoded weapon."
"Why I'm so what?" Vaclav scratched his head.
"Why you like it so much."
"Why didn't you say so in the first place? Tell him the Germans still have plenty of old tanks and armored cars, and my beast'll do for them. Tell him I've got a decent chance of killing a man from a kilometer and a half away with this baby, too."
Sergeant Halevy spoke in French. So did the French officer. Halevy translated: "He says it wasn't intended as a sniper's rifle."
"I don't give a fuck what it was intended for. It works," Vaclav declared.
He and the lieutenant stared at each other in perfect mutual incomprehension. To the logical Frenchman, that antitank rifle was made to destroy tanks. If it couldn't do the job for which it was made, it was useless. Vaclav had found it could do other things better than the ordinary rifle he'd carried till he took the big piece from a casualty.
"It will be your responsibility." The lieutenant sounded grave even when Vaclav couldn't understand him. After Halevy translated, the French officer seemed more like Pilate washing his hands.
"That's fine," Vaclav said at once. What was wrong with these people? He had less trouble understanding Germans. He hated their guts, but at least he could see what made them tick. Something else occurred to him. He rudely pointed at the young lieutenant. "You're discontinuing these rifles, right?"
"Oui." The Frenchman couldn't have been haughtier. "That is what I am trying to explain to you."
"Yeah, yeah. That means you're going to shitcan all the rounds that go with it, too, aren't you?"
Sergeant Halevy raised a gingery eyebrow. "Hey, boy, I see where you're going." He translated for the lieutenant yet again.
"Mais certainement," the French officer replied. Again, to him, if the rounds couldn't kill tanks, they couldn't do anything.
Vaclav had a different idea. "Don't throw 'em out. Give 'em to me. I'll be the-waddayacallit?-the official obsolete rifle-toter, and I'll get the guys in my squad to lug what I can't. They know what this baby can do." Even if you don't, asshole. He affectionately patted the antitank rifle's padded stock. With a bit of luck, he wouldn't have to quarrel with stuck-up French quartermaster sergeants any more.
With a bit of luck… How much would the nasty little gods in charge of war dole out? Have to wait and see.
"This is most irregular," the French officer said after the Jew translated one more time.
"Fine. It's irregular," Vaclav said. "But if it's officially irregular…" Maybe that would get through to the lieutenant.
The fellow eyed him. "You go out of your way to be difficult, n'est-ce pas?"
"To the Nazis, sure. Not to anybody else." Vaclav lied without hesitation. He was difficult with anybody who got in his way. The jerks on your own side would screw you over worse than the enemy if you gave 'em half a chance.
After more back-and-forth between Halevy and the Frenchman, the lieutenant threw his hands in the air and strode off. "He says, have it your own way," Halevy reported. "He'll see that you get the ammo. He'll probably see that you end up ass-deep in it-he's not real happy with you."
"I'd rather have too much than not enough," Jezek said.
He wondered if he meant that when he got two truckloads of wooden crates full of the thumb-sized cartridges the antitank rifle fire. No, he couldn't very well burden the Czechs in his squad with that load. Each man's share would have squashed him flat.
That meant dealing with a quartermaster sergeant after all. Fortunately, this wasn't the guy he'd almost murdered a few months earlier. Benjamin Halevy sweetened up the French noncom, and the fellow seemed amazingly willing to hang on to most of the ammo and issue it as needed.
"What did you say to him?" Vaclav asked.
"I asked him how he'd like to be the official"-Halevy bore down on the word-"keeper of what's left of the antitank-rifle ammunition. He jumped at the chance."