Last Orders: The War That Came Early (38 page)

Jack Scholes crawled over to Walsh. Only the buttons on the front of his battledress tunic kept him from getting lower to the ground than he was. A snake would have been proud to own him as a cousin. Without raising his head even a quarter of an inch, he said, “Captain ’ammersmif says we’ve got to tyke out them bloody MGs.”

“Jolly good,” Walsh answered sardonically: it was anything but. “And does he say how we’re supposed to do it?”

The tough little Cockney shook his head without getting it any higher off the ground. “ ’E wants you to ’andle it.”

“He would,” Walsh said without heat. This was what he got for being a veteran staff sergeant. Subalterns, lieutenants, even captains were suppose to lean on men like him. Men like him kept junior officers from making too many mistakes that got them and a raft of soldiers killed.

It wasn’t even as if Captain Hammersmith were wrong. They did need to take out those machine guns. Otherwise, the Fritzes would go on murdering Tommies within a two-mile-wide semicircle in front of their position for as long as they had ammo. And, being Fritzes, they would have piles of it.

But attacking the MG-42s would get more men killed. They had plenty of open ground in front and on both flanks, and more soldiers in field-gray to the rear. Coming straight at them, you needed to have made out your last will and testament beforehand, because chances were you wouldn’t stick around to take care of it afterwards.

“Have we got trench mortars? Can we get trench mortars?” Walsh asked. If he could drop bombs down on top of the Germans, he’d solve the problem on the cheap. The new company commander should have been able to figure that out for himself, no matter how unweaned he was.

“Oi’ll arsk ’im,” Scholes said, and slithered away.

“Don’t come back if we have got them,” Walsh called after him. “Don’t give the Germans the chance at you.”

He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging the best scrape he could while flat on his belly. He piled the dirt up in front of him and behind the bush. You commonly needed four sandbags’ worth of dirt to stop a rifle-caliber round: somewhere between a foot and a foot and a half, all well tamped together. Moving that much earth took a while. Well, he had nothing better to do with his time.

And damned if Jack Scholes didn’t come crawling back. “Ain’t got no fuckin’ mortars,” he reported.

“Bloody hell,” Walsh said. As soon as he finished with this scrape, he was happy enough to stay here till, oh, 1953. Maybe the
Boches
would die of old age by then or something. Anything was better than changing that nest in broad daylight.

Anything … He whistled softly. “Wot yer got, Staff?” Scholes asked. He sounded sure Walsh had something. Coming up with things was what a staff sergeant was for—or he thought so, anyhow. In that, he differed little from the captain.

“Tell him we’ll try a night attack to settle them,” Walsh said.

“ ’E wants it done now,” Scholes said dubiously.

“Then he can take care of it himself, and I’ll write his next of kin a kind letter about what a brave bloke he was—if I’m still here to do the writing,” Walsh answered. “Tell him just like that. And say nights are still long—he won’t have to wait till ten o’clock for the show.”

“Oi’ll tell ’im.” Scholes snaked off again. This time, he didn’t come
back. Walsh hoped that was because Captain Hammersmith saw reason, not because Scholes stopped something going back or moving forward. Since the captain didn’t order an attack on his own, Walsh thought he had some chance of being right.

The Fritzes stopped hosing down the landscape with bullets as twilight began to deepen. They were an orderly, predictable people—except when they went off the rails and started another world war, of course. They’d packed it in at dusk the night before, too, and the night before that. Nighttime was for rest and food, not for fighting. So they seemed to think, anyhow.

Most of the time, Walsh agreed with them. All kinds of horrible things could go wrong with a night attack. But at least you might take the Germans by surprise with one. And anything seemed better than rushing forward into the storm of lead. They’d tried that at the Somme, and lost a small city’s worth of dead the first day—which didn’t count the wounded, or what happened over the next few excruciating weeks. This would be a smaller slaughter, but not necessarily in proportion to the number of men engaged. Head-on slogging wouldn’t go. A night attack might. And so, a night attack it would be.

Walsh told off two attacking parties. Both would be armed with Sten guns. They’d need to get close, and they’d need to throw around a lot of bullets when they did. They had Mills bombs, too, lots of them, and a bazooka for whatever bunker-busting they’d need to do.

And they had compasses with radium-painted needles that glowed in the dark. With luck, they’d get close to where they were supposed to go. Without luck … Without luck, the captain or someone else would write Walsh’s kin one of those kind letters. Or maybe they’d just get a wire from the Ministry of War.

He didn’t worry about that. He worried about getting where he was going in spite of the cold, nasty drizzle that started coming down. The Germans who served those MG-42s would be nice and dry. They might even be warm. All the more reason to hate the buggers.

Once your eyes got used to it, you could see amazingly well in the dark. Not fine details, no, but plenty well enough to get around. Well enough to navigate, too, if you were careful. And the rain’s dank dripping
kept the Germans in their nests from hearing the enemy coming until he was right on top of them.

That turned out to be literally true. Walsh stuck the muzzle of his Sten into the Germans’ firing slit and emptied the whole magazine. The screams that came from inside were at least as much from shock and horror as from pain. He yanked the pin off a grenade and chucked that through the slit, too. One of his men added another. That took care of that.

It did for one MG-42, anyhow. The Germans in the other position fired off a flare and started shooting at whatever the hateful white light showed. But, because of the rain, it didn’t show as much as usual. It also didn’t alert their friends farther back that they were in trouble. And some of the Tommies had already got round behind the second machine-gun nest. They quickly finished it with grenades and submachine guns.

They threw off enough sandbags to get into the nests, plunder the dead, carry off the machine guns, and booby-trap the positions with trip wires and Mills bombs. Then they got out of there. “ ’Ere you go, Staff.” Jack Scholes handed Walsh a prize: a tube of liver paste. “An’ if anyfing’ll ’appy up the captain, loike, this ’ere little game will.”

“If anything will,” Walsh said. “For a little while.” Scholes laughed. Walsh wished he’d been joking.

When a Pe-2 taxied to takeoff, the engines stayed pretty quiet. When you gave them full throttle to get airborne, the roar filled your head. Anastas Mouradian wore a leather flight helmet. He had earphones so he could hear radio messages from his squadron commander and fellow flyers. The roar filled his head anyhow. It seemed to swallow him whole. He often marveled that it didn’t shake his molars right out of his jaw.

By the way Isa Mogamedov’s lips drew back from his teeth as the bomber started its climb, the Azeri was feeling the same way. Seeing Stas’ eyes on him, he said something.

Whatever it was, that all-consuming roar made it unintelligible.
Stas cupped a hand behind his ear to show he didn’t get it. Mogamedov obligingly tried again. He shouted and used exaggerated mouth movements so the pilot could read his lips: “Poland this time.”

“Da.”
Mouradian nodded to show he’d heard. “We’re moving forward.” He also mouthed the words, feeling much like a ham actor as he did. There were things he didn’t say, too. For instance, he didn’t remark on how long it had been since the squadron could bomb any country other than the USSR. When you said something like that, you put your life in the hands of the person to whom you said it.

Yes, a bomber pilot and copilot/bomb aimer already had their lives in each other’s hands. But that was different. If the Germans—or even the Poles—got one of them, they’d get both of them. The NKVD could pick and choose. Better, far better, not to give the Chekists the chance.

Flak came up at the Pe-2s. Mouradian’s plane bounced in the air like a truck rattling over a rutted road. But no clangs told of steel ripping through the thin aluminum skin. All the gauges stayed steady. The Germans still held part of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The Red Army hadn’t cleared them out of Latvia and Lithuania yet, either.

But the Pe-2s could hit Poland even so. They could, and they would. Marshal Smigly-Ridz needed to be reminded there was a price for choosing Hitler over Stalin. The Soviet Union had already paid an enormous price because Smigly-Ridz didn’t care to cough up Wilno when Stalin demanded it. That was one more of the things you said to nobody unless you happened to own a death wish.

On they droned. It was a longer flight than most, so Stas kept a wary eye on the fuel gauge. They’d have plenty to get where they were going and back again unless something went wrong. He eyed the gauge anyhow. Getting hit was the most likely way for something like that to go wrong, but far from the only one. A cracked line, a clogged line … The longer you’d been flying, the more possibilities like that you could think of.

He and Mogamedov both spent a lot of their time peering out every which way at once through the cockpit glass. Bf-109s, FW-190s, whatever outdated junk the Poles were flying—if you didn’t spot them before they saw you, you’d go down in flames before you could complain about how obsolete the fighters were. Stas wished he had eyes on
stalks like a crawfish so he really could look in two directions at the same time.

The squadron commander’s voice sounded tinnily in his earphones: “That’s Wilno dead ahead. We’ll aim at the railroad yards and the steel mills.”

Railroad connections and factories had made Stalin want the town in the first place. Now his minions would try to wreck them. If you thought about it, it reminded you of a spoiled five-year-old.
If I can’t have them, you don’t get to use them, either!
The scary thing was, that was probably just what was going through Stalin’s beady little mind.

Yet another thing you couldn’t say. Mouradian could say “Acknowledged,” so he did. He also called into the speaking tube: “Lower the bomb-bay doors, Fedya. We’re almost there.”

“I’m doing it,” the bombardier answered. And Mechnikov did. The wind howled in a new way as it whipped around inside the bomb bay.

Flak started coming up from the guns in and around Wilno. The fire was fierce and accurate. Whether those were Poles or Germans down there, they knew their business.

Stas tipped the Pe-2 into a shallow dive all the same. “A little to the left, Comrade Pilot,” Mogamedov said. “We’re coming up on the train station.”

“A little to the left.” Stas adjusted their course.

“Let them go, Fedya!” the Azeri called to the bombardier. The explosives fell free. The bomb-bay doors closed. Stas yanked the Pe-2 around in a tight turn and scooted for home.

Just in time. Messerschmitts tore into the Red Air Force bombers. One dove past Mouradian’s plane and was gone before he could open up on it. He did see that it was marked with Poland’s two-by-two red-and-white checkerboard rather than the German swastika. So the Poles weren’t flying junk any more, then. Hitler’d sold them fighters worth having.

The machine gun in the dorsal turret chattered furiously. Fyodor Mechnikov saw something worth shooting at, or thought he did. Better to blast away at something that wasn’t there than to let a Fritz—or even a Pole—shoot you from behind.

Two planes trailing smoke and fire spun toward the ground: a Pe-2
and a smaller 109. Mouradian gunned his machine till all the performance gauges cranked well into the red. The groundcrew men could fix the engines later. Or they could if he bought himself a later for the mechanics to fix them in.

He wondered if he should try to get higher. If he did, he and his crewmates would have a chance to bail out in case a 109 shot up the plane. But climbing would cost him speed, and speed was what would get him out of here. A Pe-2 was just about as fast as a Messerschmitt, and had far more range. Going flat out would bring him back to the airstrip with less gas in the tanks than he’d expected, but that was the least of his worries now.

Another bomber from the squadron went down. What made a fighter pilot go after one plane but not another? The size of the red stars on its wings? The way the sunlight shone off the cockpit or the turret and drew his notice? Being in the right place to dive on the Pe-2? Or nothing more than dumb luck? Stas had no answers. He’d never had any answers to questions like those. All he knew was, he was still around to ask them.

Ten minutes put ninety kilometers or so between him and the Polish 109s waspishly defending Wilno. One more check showed only a few scattered Pe-2s close enough to see. When he eased back on the throttles, the engines seemed to sigh in relief. The pointers on the dials fell back to safe levels.

“Another one down,” Mogamedov said, and then, “A few more like that and we don’t come home from one.”

“Afraid you’re right,” Stas said. “But it’s not as if we haven’t known that for a while, is it?”

“No.” After a beat, Mogamedov added, “No wonder so many Russian pilots drink like fish, is it?”

“Mm, maybe not,” Stas said. “But do they drink because they’re pilots and they know they’re going to catch one, or just because they’re Russians? Some of the Russians in the groundcrew pour it down every bit as hard, and they never get off the ground.”

“And some of the pilots would drink like that if they didn’t fly,” Mogamedov allowed. “Not all of them would, though, or I don’t think so.”

“It could be. I may do some drinking myself today once we get down,” Mouradian said.

“Some drinking? Most people do some drinking. Drinking till you can’t see any more—that’s different,” Mogamedov said.

He hardly ever did even some drinking. But, as you didn’t say some things, so you didn’t ask some questions. If he admitted he was a believing Muslim, he would be giving Stas a hold on him. If he denied it, he might be lying. The two of them were all right in the cockpit, and in the officers’ tent. For an Armenian and an Azeri, that would do, and more than do.