"We've got the Poles on the run." Sergei almost shouted, to make himself heard over the drone of the SB-2's twin radial engines. "It took a while, but now we do. A week from now, we won't just be bombing Wilno. We'll be shelling it-see if we won't. The Poles are brave, but that only helps so much when you haven't got the horses-or when the horses are all you've got."
Mouradian nodded again. He'd heard the same stories Sergei had: about how Polish cavalrymen, square-topped csapkas on their heads and drawn sabers gleaming in the sun, had charged Red Army tanks. You did have to be brave to do something like that. Didn't you also have to be out of your mind? Not many of the Poles who'd galloped forward galloped back again.
"All right. Fine. We have the Poles on the run. Now what?" Mouradian said after what seemed a pause for consideration. His Russian was fluent, but carried a throaty Armenian accent. He sounded a little like Stalin on the radio. Sergei thought so, anyhow, but Mouradian got offended when the Russian told him so. If you listened to Stas, Armenian and Georgian were nothing like each other. But, if you listened to him explaining that, he still sounded like Stalin.
He also took a perverse-a Caucasian?-pride in being difficult. "What do you mean, 'Now what?'" Sergei said. "We take back the chunk of Poland Pilsudski stole from us while we were fighting our civil war, that's what."
"And what do the Poles do then?" Anastas inquired. "Better yet, what do the Germans do then?"
The Germans couldn't do what Sergei suggested. Human beings weren't made that way. Mouradian chuckled indulgently, as he might have at a six-year-old showing off. Sergei went on, "But who cares what they do? If the Poles make peace with us, the Nazis have to get out of Poland, right?"
"They're good at marching into places. They aren't so good at marching out again," Stas said, which was bound to be true. He added, "Besides, they're still at war with us any which way. They have been since Czechoslovakia."
"Well, so what?" Sergei didn't like to think about Czechoslovakia. He and Stas and Ivan Kuchkov had come out again, which a lot of other "volunteers" hadn't. He'd first made the acquaintance of the Bf-109 there. If he never saw another angular German fighter, he wouldn't be sorry.
"So Hitler will find some other way to keep the fight going," Mouradian predicted. "He hates the Soviet Union worse than he hates France and England."
That held a nasty ring of truth. Yaroslavsky was glad to have to pay attention to his flying for a little while as he descended toward this new airstrip on what had been Polish soil. "He may hate us, but is he crazy?" he asked, leveling off again. "Does he want a two-front war?"
"Germany almost won the last one," Anastas answered, which was true even if unpalatable. "And it doesn't look like America's going to get into this one."
Sergei's grunt could have been taken as one of effort, because he was cranking down the landing gear. A hydraulic or electrical system would have been easier on the pilot. It also would have been more expensive and harder to build. He-and every other SB-2 pilot-went on working the crank.
Without American soldiers and munitions, France and England likely would have lost the World War-the First World War, it was now. That didn't make Soviet citizens love the USA. American troops in the north and the Far East had done their best to strangle the Russian Revolution in its cradle. They'd gone home, grudgingly, only after their best turned out not to be good enough.
The bomber set down roughly and taxied to a stop. Groundcrew men trotted up as the crew scrambled out of the plane. "How did it go, Comrades?" the chief maintenance sergeant asked.
"We put the bombs on target in Wilno," Sergei said. "Not much antiaircraft fire. The Poles are wearing down."
"About time," the sergeant said. "I don't know why they got so excited over Wilno to begin with-or why we want it, come to that. Damn town is full of Litvaks and Jews." He spat in the dirt.
Before Sergei could answer that or even think about it much, Ivan Kuchkov stiffened like an animal taking a scent. He cocked his head to one side, listening intently. Then he said something worse than his usual mat-laced obscenities: "Messerschmitts! Heading this way!"
Sergei started running before he heard the planes himself. So did everybody else within earshot of the Chimp. Long before the pilot got to the trenches on one side of the runway, he did hear the hateful roar of the fighters' engines. That only made him run harder.
He didn't run hard enough to get to the trenches before the 109s' machine guns and cannon started stitching down the airstrip. Dust spurted up from the hits. Rounds slammed into the metal and doped fabric covering his SB-2. He didn't look back. He did a swan dive-if you could imagine a spastic swan-into the zigzagging trench.
That maintenance sergeant landed in the trench beside him. "Too goddamn close," Sergei said, panting. "I'm lucky I didn't break my ankle jumping down here."
The sergeant didn't answer. He wouldn't, either. A bullet-or, more likely, a 20mm round-had taken off the top of his head. Blood and brains soaked into the black dirt. One second, he'd been running for cover. The next? It was over. Lots of worse ways to go. Pilots found too many of them. If you got shot down, you were liable to have a lot of time to think before you finally smashed.
"Bozhemoi!" Anastas Mouradian said. "Poor bugger cashed in his chips all at once, didn't he?"
"I was thinking the same thing," Sergei answered as the Messerschmitts zoomed away at just above treetop height. Now he could smell the maintenance man's blood, and the nastier smells that said his bowels and bladder had let go when he stopped one.
"Za Stalina," Mouradian added somberly. About every third Red Army tank and Red Air Force bomber had For Stalin! painted on its side. You fought for Stalin. And you died for Stalin, too. He looked after the 109s. They were long gone now. "You see? The Nazis haven't dried up and blown away."
"Well… no." Sergei didn't like to admit that. Oh, he knew Poles could kill him, too. But the Germans, damn them, were much too good at such things. He wondered what they'd done to his plane. It wasn't burning, anyhow. A couple of bullets through the engines sure wouldn't do it any good, though. Two of the tires on the landing gear were flat. That would make getting it out of the way for repairs even more fun than it would have been otherwise.
They'd have to do it, fun or not. They couldn't just leave the SB-2 in the middle of the runway. Not only did it clog Soviet air operations here, it sent the Luftwaffe an engraved invitation to come back.
"Planes… We can fight back against planes," Stas said, and Sergei made himself nod. It was true-to a point. The Bf-109 outdid anything the Red Air Force flew. Both biplane and blunt-nosed monoplane Polikarpov fighters were last year's models-no, year before last's-next to it. New machines that could meet the fearsome Messerschmitts on even terms were supposed to be in the works. But the hot Soviet planes weren't here yet, and the Germans had theirs now. In a low voice, Mouradian went on, "What happens if the Nazis throw their panzers at us?"
Sergei took a deep breath, then immediately wished he hadn't. It wasn't just that he smelled the butcher-shop and outhouse reeks of the groundcrew man's sudden demise. But the damp-earth smell of the trench reminded him of a new-dug grave. He'd smelled that smell when they put his mother in the ground.
"Hitler wouldn't do that," he protested, remembering how stunned he'd been then. "He may be crazy, but he's not stupid. He'd really have a two-front war if he did."
"Well, maybe. I hope you're right," Mouradian said. "But so would we, and we didn't the last time around."