Chapter 17
"Moscow speaking," the radio said importantly.
Sergei Yaroslavsky yawned as he listened. He was drinking a glass of strong, sweet tea and smoking a cigarette, but it was still six in the morning. Had he had any choice, he would have stayed rolled in his blanket.
A thick slab of roast pork, glistening with fat at the edges, sat on the tin plate in front of him. Had he had any choice, he wouldn't have picked something like that for breakfast. It would fill him up better than black bread; he couldn't deny that. But it would also make him want to go back to sleep… wouldn't it?
He sawed away with knife and fork. Methodically, he chewed and swallowed. As soon as he got up in the air, he wouldn't be sleepy any more. He was sure of that. Sleep and terror blended like vodka and castor oil.
Several flyers were fortifying their tea with healthy shots of vodka: the ration was a hundred grams a day. Others were swigging the vodka and ignoring the tea. Sergei preferred not to do that. You might be bolder in the cockpit once you'd got outside with some antifreeze, but you'd surely be slower. Against German fighter planes, against skilled, sober German pilots, slower wasn't a good idea.
"The liberation of Poland from the clutches of the semifascist Smigly-Ridz clique and their Nazi henchmen continues to gather momentum," the newscaster declared. "Advances on a broad front accelerate. Polish soldiers surrender in growing numbers, recognizing the hopelessness of their cause and the justice behind the Red Army's struggle against the lawless hyenas who have led them to destruction."
"He doesn't say anything about the fucking Germans surrendering," remarked a pilot who was knocking back vodka as if afraid it would be outlawed tomorrow-not likely, not in the hard-drinking Soviet Union.
"Hush," three people said at the same time. The only good thing about fighting Germans was that there weren't many of them in Poland. As Sergei had seen in Czechoslovakia, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were dauntingly good at what they did.
The brief byplay made him miss the newsman's latest recital of towns taken and towns bombed from the air. The voice on the radio might have been broadcasting a football match. If he was, he was definitely the home team's announcer. If you listened to him, you had to believe the Red Army and Air Force could do no wrong.
Then he switched to a match in a different league: "The Fascist occupation of Denmark appears to be all but unchallenged. The Danes have chosen not even to fight. If they hope for mercy from the Nazi jackals, they are doomed to disappointment. Combat does continue in Norway. England and France claim to be flooding men into the country to help the Norwegians resist the Hitlerite jackals. Oslo and the south, however, seem already to be in German hands. Whether counterattacks can be effective remains to be seen. The Fascists claim to have inflicted heavy losses on the Royal Navy."
He talked about the fighting in France. There wasn't much. Then, at last, with the air of a prim matron discussing the facts of life, he talked about the war in the Far East. He kept going on about how heavy the fighting there was.
Across the table from Sergei, Anastas Mouradian raised an eyebrow. Yaroslavsky nodded back. They didn't mean to speak; speaking would have endangered them. But heavy fighting was never good news.
Sure enough, the broadcaster went on, "High-ranking officers in the combat zone are no longer completely certain that Vladivostok's resistance against the Japanese brigands can continue indefinitely."
Vladivostok would fall. That was what he meant. He didn't want to come right out and say so-and who could blame him? With the Trans-Siberian Railway cut, the Japanese were nipping off the USSR's main window on the Pacific. The only word for that was disaster.
Not everybody would be able to understand exactly what the newsreader meant. Most people, very likely, would think Vladivostok could still hold out for a long time, even if not forever. But why mention that it might fall if you weren't getting ready to admit that it would fall, or even that it had fallen?
He wanted to sigh with relief when the announcer shifted to the over-fulfillment of the steel quota and then gave forth with the gory details of a train collision down in the Ukraine. "One of the engineers is suspected of being drunk on the job," the newsreader said portentously. "The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR finds this most unfortunate."
The fellow said no more about that, nor did he need to. If Stalin didn't like it… Well, anything could happen after that. Sergei had thought a program of prohibition impossible in his homeland. The Tsars had tried one during the last war, and it failed miserably-Russians drank like swine. But if Stalin wanted to do the same thing, who would stop him? Nobody.
The pilots who'd already started drinking drank faster than ever. Maybe the stuff really would be outlawed tomorrow. Maybe… but Sergei still wouldn't believe it till he saw it.
"Molodetschna," Colonel Borisov said. "We hit Molodetschna again. We have to keep the Nazis from getting through and getting away."
Anastas Mouradian raised a hand. Frowning, the squadron commander nodded his way. "Comrade Colonel, is it not likely that as many Germans as could get through the miserable place have already done it?" the Armenian asked.
It was more than likely: it was as near certain as made no difference. They'd been pounding Molodetschna since the war widened. Too many SB-2s had gone down in flames to Bf-109s and the heavy concentration of antiaircraft guns around the place. They'd watched panzers and infantry units entrain and head elsewhere. Colonel Borisov had flown over Molodetschna. He knew what was and wasn't going on there, too-or he should have.
But he also knew something else. "I have my orders, Mouradian," he said heavily. "We have our orders. We will carry them out. Is that clear?"
"I serve the Soviet Union!" Mouradian said. That was always the right answer.
Ivan Kuchkov also knew about the new orders. Maybe he'd had a separate briefing from someone less exalted than the squadron leader. Or maybe, being a sergeant, he'd found out about them before Borisov or any of the other officers. He wasn't worried about coming out with what he thought of things, either: "Only way the cunts don't fucking murder us is if they don't care about the place any more."
Sergei set a hand on his shoulder. "It's nice, the way you try to cheer us up," he said. The squat, muscular bombardier eyed him suspiciously. The Chimp was a stranger to irony, and a hostile stranger at that.
The SB-2 lumbered into the air. Sergei remembered how proud of his "fighting bomber" he'd been while serving as a "volunteer" in Czechoslovakia. Against the biplane fighters they'd seen in Spain, SB-2s were fine. Against the deadly German Messerschmitts… well, they lumbered.
Through the engines' din, Mouradian said, "What if the Red Army's already taken Molodetschna? Are we supposed to bomb our own men?"
There was an interesting question. It all but defined Damned if you do and damned if you don't. You could get shot for dropping bombs on your own side. But you could also get shot-you could very easily get shot-for not following orders. "Let's see what it looks like," Sergei said, and left it there. If he didn't have to make up his mind right now, he wouldn't.
When he saw black puffs of smoke ahead, he nodded to himself. The Germans still held the town. Soviet flak wouldn't have been anywhere near so intense. Yaroslavsky was a good patriot, but he knew what his own people could and couldn't do.
Now-where was the train station? He had a devil of a time spotting it. Either Red Army artillery had set Molodetschna ablaze or the Nazis had fired the town on purpose to give themselves a smoke screen. If he thought of it, they could, too, and they were more than ruthless enough to do it once they thought of it.