The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (54 page)

The rest of the section took its own sweet time catching up to Kuchkov. The men weren’t fools. They could tell they were pretty safe where they were. The farther ahead they moved, the better—or rather, the worse—their chance
of bumping into Nazis with guns.

Kuchkov profanely explained how they were going to skirt the swell of ground ahead. He also told half a dozen soldiers to rush to Avram’s rescue if the point man’s luck ran out. “You fuck that up, you better be more scared of me than you are of those German walking foreskins,” he added. The soldiers nodded. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of Ivan didn’t know him very
well.

It had been drizzling. The rain started coming down harder as he took his section where it needed to go. In a way, that was good: the Germans
would have more trouble noticing them. In another, not so good: the Red Army men would have more trouble spotting the Fascists.

Avram carried a PPD-34, too. You wanted to be able to throw a lot of lead at the bad guys in a hurry if you came across
them when you didn’t expect to. Ivan kept his head cocked toward the top of the low hillock. He’d hear that snarl through the rain’s plashing.

It didn’t come. He got the rest of the section where they needed to go. Then he waited. Avram Davidov materialized as if out of thin air. “I think there are some Germans in the trees along the stream up ahead,” he said.

“You sure?” Ivan asked him.

“Pretty
sure, Comrade Sergeant,” Davidov answered. “I don’t have any field glasses, but they looked like Germans, sure as the devil.”

“Bugger the cocksucking Devil,” Kuchkov said. He turned to another Red Army man. “Yuri!”

“
Da
, Comrade Sergeant?”

“Go back and tell the company CO that we’ve bumped into the fucking Fascists. Ask him if he wants to reinforce us for a proper attack or if we should just
sit tight and keep an eye on the pussies. You got me?”

“Da,”
Yuri said again, and accurately gave back what Ivan had said. Like his sergeant, he could no more read and write than he could fly. He relied on his memory in ways people who could write never did. He was also pretty good at traveling cross-country—not so good as Avram, but good enough. Off he went, at the fastest clip the mud allowed.

Ivan didn’t need to order his men to start digging foxholes and camouflaging them. The soldiers automatically did that when they saw they wouldn’t be moving up for a while. The foxholes here would be nasty places, and would start filling up with water soon. The men dug anyhow. If German machine guns or artillery were going to probe for them, they wanted somewhere to hide.

Yuri probably wouldn’t
make it back for a couple of hours. It might be dark by the time he did, which would put things off till tomorrow. Ivan didn’t mind; he was in no hurry to get shot at. He just hoped the Nazis weren’t readying their own onslaught. They might not need to
wait hours to set up something good-sized. The bastards had radio sets falling out of their assholes.

Night came before either Yuri or a German
attack. Yuri did manage to find his way back in the dark, and the jumpy sentries managed not to shoot him when he did. “Reinforcements will come up in the morning,” he reported. “The captain wants us to sit tight till then.”

“Khorosho,”
Ivan said. The order let him to what he already wanted to, which suited him fine.

But, as Avram discovered, the Germans reinforced under cover of darkness. The
Soviet attack never went in. Instead, the Red Army pulled back another kilometer or two and tried to draw a firm line in the mud.

Chapter 23

H
ans-Ulrich Rudel shivered. Snowflakes swirled through the air. His breath smoked. The ordinary
Luftwaffe
greatcoat wasn’t defense enough against the Russian winter. He’d have to go back to wearing his flying togs all the time, the way he had the year before.

The
Wehrmacht
had been caught short last winter.
Even the Germans’ Polish allies laughed at them or, worse, pitied them because of their inadequate cold-weather gear. Nothing could embarrass German national pride worse than pity from a pack of slovenly, hard-drinking, wife-beating Poles.

Things were better this year. Proper winter clothing was reaching the
Landsers
who needed it most in something like adequate quantities. They wouldn’t have
to steal lousy, flea-infested sheepskin jackets from Russian peasants, the way they had before. They wouldn’t have to tailor bedsheets into camouflage smocks for the snow, either. There were proper snowsuits, reversible between white and
Feldgrau
. Progress, of a sort.

But only of a sort. As a lot of invaders had discovered before Germany tried it, Russia was easy to get into. Getting out was
a lot harder.
You could win victory after victory … and then what? The Red Army kept throwing in fresh divisions as if it manufactured them in Magnitogorsk. And there were always more kilometers of broad, flat Russian terrain ahead of the men from the
Reich
.

Nobody talked much about having a bear by the ears. Get labeled a defeatist and you’d soon envy men who’d only been captured by the Ivans.
Hans-Ulrich was sure, though, that if he’d started having doubts about what Germany could hope to accomplish here, other people had worse ones and had had them longer. He was automatically loyal to the
Reich
, to the Party, and to the
Führer
. Others tried to separate the idea of Germany from the people actually running the country.

And there were other worries. Not long after the ground got hard
enough to let them start flying again, Albert Dieselhorst sidled up to Rudel on the airstrip and spoke in a low voice: “What have you heard about the French?”

“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich blinked. “What do you mean, what have I heard about them? They eat frogs’ legs and snails. They make good wine, too, though you’d care more about that than I do. What else am I supposed to know?”

His radioman and rear
gunner breathed out twin gusts of exasperation through his nostrils. “In a military sense … sir.” The military honorific plainly took the place of something more like
you donkey
.

“Well …” Hans-Ulrich chose his words with care, even with Dieselhorst. If he talked about the way the French had held the
Reich
out of Paris two wars in a row, he could still end up in trouble. So he stuck with the obvious:
“They’re holding a stretch of the line not too far south of here.”

“Yes. They are.” The sergeant exhaled again, not quite so extravagantly this time. “How hard are they holding it?”

“Huh?” Hans-Ulrich repeated. This time, though, he didn’t stay a blockhead long. Even an innocent like him began looking for plots when the war wasn’t going so well. “What? Do you think they’re going to try and pull
an England on us?”

“It’s … possible.” Dieselhorst seemed happier that his superior did have some kind of clue after all. “Are you ready to fly against them if we have to?”

“I’m always ready to fly against the enemies of the
Reich
,” Rudel answered, now without the least hesitation.

Sergeant Dieselhorst grinned crookedly. He reached out and set a hand on Hans-Ulrich’s arm. It wasn’t the kind
of thing a noncom was supposed to do with an officer. It was, though, the kind of thing an older man might naturally do with a younger one he liked. “There you go, sir. I should’ve known you’d come out with something like that.”

“Well, what else do you expect me to say?” If Hans-Ulrich sounded irritable, it was only because he was. He was a falcon. Fly him at something, and he’d kill it for you.
What it was didn’t matter, as long as you wanted it dead. He didn’t think of himself in those terms, of course. But then, chances were a true winged, taloned falcon didn’t think of itself in those terms, either.

“Not a thing, sir. Not a goddamn thing.” Dieselhorst paused, perhaps wondering whether to go on. After a few seconds, he did: “If the froggies screw us over, we’ve got a two-front war
for real.”

“God forbid!” Rudel burst out. That had been the nightmare in the last fight, one that Germany hadn’t had to face this time around. If she did … Well, the war got harder.

“God won’t forbid it. God doesn’t work that way.” Dieselhorst spoke about God with as much assurance and conviction as Hans-Ulrich’s father ever had. He went on, “People are going to have to take care of it. One
way or another, it’ll be people. It always is.”

He sketched a salute and ambled off. No one, not even a National Socialist Loyalty Officer, could have made anything of the conversation if he didn’t overhear it. They’d been flying together since the start of the war: more than three years now. Of course they’d have things to talk about.

If France went bad, the
Luftwaffe
would have to fight back
out of Germany itself. Well, out of the Low Countries, too. But all that seemed small consolation for so much fighting, so much treasure, so much blood. And if France let England back onto the Continent while the war against the Russians ground on … That could be very bad. Hans-Ulrich didn’t need to be a General Staff officer to see as much.

Two days later, he got up the nerve to ask Colonel
Steinbrenner, “Sir, just how loyal are the French?”

The squadron commander blinked.
“Et tu, Brute?”
he said.

“Sir?” He might as well have been speaking Latin. After a moment, Hans-Ulrich realized he was.

Sighing, Steinbrenner dropped back into plain old
Deutsch:
“So you’ve heard the rumors, too, have you?”

Rudel also realized that, if he had, odds were everybody else in the squadron had been
buzzing about them this past fortnight, or maybe longer.
There
was an encouraging thought. Not even winning the Knight’s Cross had made him less of a white crow. “Yes, sir. I’ve heard them,” he mumbled.

“Well, now that you have, you know as much as I do,” Steinbrenner said. “If they turn out to be true, we’ve got some new troubles. If they don’t, we’ve got our old lot. Any
other
questions?”

What came out of Hans-Ulrich’s mouth then surprised him: “Can I get a little bit of leave, sir? Long enough to go back to Bialystok? If things turn bad, I’d like to have the chance to say good-bye to Sofia.”

“You know, you ask so few favors, it makes me nervous sometimes,” Steinbrenner said. “Yes, I’ll give you leave. What you do with it is your business, not mine. Enjoy yourself, though.”

“Thank
you very much, sir!” Hans-Ulrich stiffened to attention and saluted. Colonel Steinbrenner’s answer was more a wave than a salute, but that was a superior’s privilege.

Three days later, Hans-Ulrich was back in Poland. It was snowing in Bialystok, too. He didn’t feel so cold there, though. The tavern where Sofia worked wasn’t far from the train station. German and Polish soldiers crowded the place,
drinking as if they didn’t want to think about tomorrow—and they probably didn’t.

The bartender stuck his head into the back room and shouted something in Polish that had Sofia’s name in it. She came out a moment later, trim and neat as always. The bartender pointed toward Hans-Ulrich, who sat at a small table against the wall.

She walked over to him. “You again. So they haven’t shot you down
yet?”

“As a matter of fact, they did, but I managed to bail out,” he answered, which sobered her. He went on, “Bring me a coffee, will you?”

“You’ll make us rich!” she exclaimed, snippy as ever. Her pleated skirt swished around her legs as she went off to get it.

When she set it—almost slammed it—down on the tabletop, Hans-Ulrich said, “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep coming
back here. We’re liable to get transferred.” He didn’t say anything about the possibility of flying from Germany again. Let her think he was going to the Ukraine or something. He assumed she was no spy, but he took no chances.

He waited for one of her patented zingers to come back at him. She surprised him by gnawing at her lower lip and not saying anything for a little while. Finally, she murmured,
“Well, it was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?”

“It’s not over yet,” he said quickly.

“You want to lay me some more, you mean.” That sounded like her, all right.

He quirked an eyebrow. “You’d be amazed.”

“It’s been more fun than I ever figured it could be, so maybe you’ll get another chance,” she said. “Maybe—if you wait like a good boy till I come off my shift.”

He clasped his hands on the
table in front of him, as if he were eight years old and sitting at a school desk. Laughing, Sofia swirled away again.

CARLOS FEDERICO WEINBERG YOWLED
lustily in Chaim’s arms. The baby had La Martellita’s blue-black hair—a startling amount of it, when so many little tiny guys were bald. Telling who newborn babies looked like was a mug’s game—they mostly looked squashed. Chaim hoped this one would
end up taking after its mother.

Carlos screwed up his face and started to cry. “Hey, I’m not
that
ugly,” Chaim said, first in English and then in Spanish.

La Martellita rolled her eyes. She hardly ever thought his jokes were funny. “Give him to me. He’s hungry,” she said. “When he cries like that, that’s what he means.”