The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (39 page)

March Vaclav did. He hadn’t done a route march in quite a while. Picking them up and laying them down was no more fun than it had been the last time. If anything, it was worse, because his antitank rifle weighed at least twice as much as an ordinary piece.

He wondered what the Spanish Republicans would make of a sniper with an elephant gun. From what he’d heard, neither side down there had much in the way of armor. Well, there’d be plenty of—what did they call the assholes on the other side? Nationalists, that was it—plenty of Nationalists who needed killing.

There’d probably be plenty of Republicans who needed killing, too. He hoped not too many of them tried giving him orders. The enemy … You could deal with the enemy. You knew what he was, and you knew where he was. But you were stuck with your so-called friends.

Benjamin Halévy fell in beside him. “I wish this turned out better,” the Jew said.

“Fuck it. What can you do?” Vaclav said. “Spain’ll be another balls-up, won’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Halévy answered. “But whenever the brass are willing to send you somewhere, you’ve got to guess they aren’t doing you a favor.”

“If they want to do me a favor, they can all drop dead.”

“There you go.” They marched on, away from one stalemated war that had suddenly flipped upside down and towards another.

AS FAR AS THEO
Hossbach could see, Byelorussia looked a hell of a lot like Poland. Maybe it was a little shabbier, or maybe that was his imagination.
He understood little bits and pieces of Polish, as a lot of Germans from Breslau did. Byelorussian sounded different, but not all that different. And a lot of villages had Jews in them. They could manage with German, and he could do the same with Yiddish.

The biggest change was in the signs. Polish and German used the same alphabet. Sometimes he could guess written words he didn’t know. But the Soviet Union’s Cyrillic script was almost as incomprehensible as Chinese would have been.

Adalbert Stoss said very much the same thing. When he did, Hermann Witt gave him a wry grin and answered, “We didn’t come here to read, Adi.”

“Ah, stuff it,” Adi said. They both laughed.

So did Theo. If Heinz Naumann had said something like that to Stoss, the driver probably would have come back with the same response. But Heinz wouldn’t have been grinning, and Adi would have meant what he said. That the other panzer commander and Stoss hadn’t got along was an understatement. Naumann was dead now, though, and the feud buried with him in a badly marked grave back in Poland.

Witt attacked the engine with screwdriver and wrench. After liberating the carburetor, he held it up in triumph … of sorts. He delivered his verdict like a judge pronouncing sentence: “This thing sucks, you know?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” Adi said. “We clean out the valves, it’ll do all right for a while—till it decides not to, anyway.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Witt agreed. “I wonder if the carb on the Panzer III’s any better.”

“I’d sure like to find out,” Stoss said.

Theo nodded. No matter what the carburetor was like, everything that counted was better on a Panzer III. Thicker armor, a cannon that could fire both high-explosive and armor-piercing rounds, a machine gun in the turret and another one in the hull … What was there not to like?

He could think of two things. The turret cannon and machine gun took a loader and gunner, which meant there would be a couple of new people to get used to—never his favorite pastime. And, more to the point, the
Reich
still didn’t have enough Panzer IIIs to go around, so he was worrying about getting used to a pair of imaginary soldiers.

Back when Naumann commanded the Panzer II, the carb also misbehaved. He and Adi had quarreled about it. Witt didn’t seem to want to quarrel with anybody except the Ivans. Theo approved of that.

The next morning, the promotion fairy sprinkled magic dust on the panzer’s crew. Adi became a
Gefreiter
, and Theo himself an
Obergefreiter
. Witt slapped him on the back and said, “They’ll pull you out and turn you into a real noncom pretty soon.”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Theo answered. The
Wehrmacht
had one more grade below
Unteroffizier
or corporal. After that, you had to go to training classes to get rid of the emblem on your sleeve and acquire an
Unteroffizier’s
shoulder-strap pip. Theo had had enough of training classes in basic to last him the rest of his life and twenty minutes longer.

Witt laughed. “Might do you good. It’d make you come out of your shell a little bit, maybe.”

“Maybe.” Theo didn’t believe it for a minute. He could no more come out of his shell than a turtle could escape from its. It was part of him. If anything, he wished he came equipped with a Panzer III’s armor, not a Panzer II’s.

Heinz Naumann would have gone on giving him grief about it. Witt didn’t. All he said was “You keep living through fights, they’ll make you an
Unteroffizier
whether you like it or not.”

“Oh, boy,” Theo said. The panzer commander laughed again. Had Theo been the kind to come out with what he was thinking, he might have added that he’d never run into a better reason to get killed. He hated the idea of giving other people orders. He didn’t like getting told what to do himself, either. He was, perhaps, not ideally suited to the
Wehrmacht
.

That, of course, bothered the
Wehrmacht
not a bit. Round peg? Square hole? Drive the damn thing in anyway. Hit it hard enough and it’ll stay in place. Then we can hang some more stuff from it and get on with the war.

Adi Stoss was thinking of other things. “You know what?” he said. “Winter in Russia’s liable to make winter in Poland look like a Riviera holiday.”

“Try not to sound so cheerful about it, all right?” Witt said. “Besides,
we’ll have the Poles and the French and the Tommies shivering right beside us. Oh—and the Ivans, too, of course.”

“Aber natürlich,”
Adi agreed with more sardonic good cheer. “But the Ivans do this every year. They’re used to it, poor devils. The rest of us aren’t, except maybe the Poles.”

“You’re jam-packed with happy thoughts today, aren’t you?” Witt said. “Why don’t you gather up some firewood?”

“I thought
Gefreiters
didn’t have to do shit like that,” Stoss said. “Isn’t the whole point of getting promoted not needing to do shit like that any more?”

“Like I told Theo, getting promoted means you didn’t get blown up,” the panzer commander answered. “If you figure out how to pack a servant into the panzer, he can gather firewood for us. Till then, somebody’s got to do it, and right now that’s you.”

“Come the revolution, you won’t be able to abuse the proletariat like this.” Adi went off to collect sticks and boards.

Witt looked after him, shaking his head. “He sails close to the wind, doesn’t he?” he murmured, perhaps more to himself than to Theo. “If somebody who takes the political lectures seriously heard him, he’d go on the rocks faster than a guy with the shits runs for the latrine.”

Theo shrugged to show he’d heard. He did his share of fatigues, even though he was now an exalted
Obergefreiter
. For that matter, so did the sergeant. Adi knew as much, too; he was just making trouble for the fun of it. A panzer wasn’t like an infantry platoon, with plenty of ordinary privates to do the dirty work for everyone else.

They rolled forward again the next morning—but not very far forward. The Russians had laid an ambush, with panzers hidden in a village and antipanzer cannon hiding among the fruit trees off to one side. The Germans pulled back after a couple of Panzer IIs brewed up and another lost a track.

Maybe the Ivans thought they’d halted their enemies. If they did, they soon learned better. Stukas plastered the orchard with high explosive. One of them, with cannon under the wings in place of bombs, dove on the village again and again. The columns of greasy black smoke rising into the sky spoke of hits.

Adi and Hermann Witt watched him swoop in the distance. They whooped and cheered and carried on. Theo watched the dials on the panzer’s radio set. He could see the machine pistol on its brackets near the set and, if he turned his head, the back of the chair in which the panzer commander sat. Since Witt wasn’t sitting now, Theo could also see his legs. It wasn’t an exciting view. Theo didn’t care. He wanted excitement the way he wanted a second head.

And, while the Stukas kept the Russians who’d set the trap hopping, more German panzers raced around their flank. The Ivans skedaddled; they were always nervous about their flanks. Theo’s panzer company, or the survivors thereof, rolled past the village where they’d been held up. They didn’t roll through it, a plan Theo liked. Nobody knew for sure whether all the Red Army men had abandoned the place. They might be waiting in there with Molotov cocktails and antipanzer rifles and whatever other unpleasantnesses they could come up with.

German and Polish infantry tramped along behind the panzers. Before too long, the ground pounders would come through here and clear out whatever Russians remained behind. In the meantime, the panzers would motor ahead and bite out another chunk of territory for the infantry to clear.

This was how things worked when blitzkrieg ran according to plan. When things went wrong, you outran your infantry support and the enemy concentrated against you where you couldn’t outflank him. That had happened in France. There was a lot more space to play with in the Soviet Union. Maybe it wouldn’t happen here. Theo hoped not. He wanted to win. More than anything else, though, he wanted to go home.

ANASTAS MOURADIAN
would have liked more training on the Pe-2 than he got. No matter what he would have liked, he and his classmates went into action as soon as they figured out the controls and took off and landed a few times.

He did have a better plane than he’d flown before. The SB-2 had been a fine bomber in its day, but its day was done. In a couple of years, no doubt, something newer and snazzier would also replace the Pe-2.
Till then, Mouradian was happy to fly one against the Soviet Union’s enemies.

Was Sergei Yaroslavsky still hauling his old SB-2 around the sky? For his sake, his former bomb-aimer hoped not. The Pe-2 was close to a 150 kilometers an hour faster. It could fly higher and carry more bombs. All that meant it had a better chance of coming back from its missions.

Three of his classmates at the airstrip outside of Moscow never got the chance to fly the new bomber against the Nazis. One of them botched a takeoff and crashed—or maybe an engine failed. Either way, he was dead. So were the two who flew their planes into the ground instead of landing them. Flying was an unforgiving business. If the Germans didn’t get you, a moment’s carelessness and you’d do yourself in.

His bomb-aimer and copilot was a Karelian named Ivan Kulkaanen. He was as blond as Anastas was dark, and spoke Russian with an odd accent. “Don’t worry—I think you sound funny, too,” he told Mouradian.

“When I talk Russian, I know I sound funny,” Stas answered. “But you should hear me in Armenian.”

Whereupon Kulkaanen gabbled out a couple of sentences in what Mouradian presumed to be his native tongue. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to him. “Finnish,” the blond man explained.

“If you say so.” Mouradian couldn’t contradict him.

Back in the bomb bay was a Russian sergeant called Fyodor Mechnikov. Like the other bombardiers Stas had known, he was brawny and foul-mouthed. “They took me off a farm,” he said, his grin displaying several stainless-steel teeth. “I’ve got the muscle. I don’t scare easy. For the shit I do, who needs brains?”

“Can you read? Can you write?” Stas asked.

Mechnikov shook his bullet head. “Not a fucking word, sir,” he answered, not without pride.

“I’ll teach you if you want.”

“Nah.” Mechnikov shook his head again. “I’ve gone this long without it, I wouldn’t know what to do if I could all of a sudden. And I remember real good. I start writing shit down, I bet I start forgetting like a son of a bitch.”

He might well have been right. Stas had dealt with more than a few illiterate enlisted men in his time. Russia was full of them. In Western Europe, they said, almost everybody could read and write. It wasn’t like that here. And illiterates did tend to have better memories than people who could read and write. They needed them.

The newsreaders on the radio tried their best to give the impression that everything at the front was fine. Their best might have convinced civilians who hadn’t seen German soldiers or had German bombs fall on them yet. But if everything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe, why was the Red Air Force rushing half-trained Pe-2 pilots to the front as fast as it could?

Stas didn’t think anything was as wonderful as the radio wanted people to believe. He never had. Soviet propaganda was primarily aimed at Russians, and Russians, as seen through the jaundiced eye of a man from the Caucasus, lacked a certain subtlety. So did Soviet propaganda, at least to Mouradian. Stalin was a man from the Caucasus, too. Chances were he chuckled cynically at the stuff he had his propagandists put out. Which didn’t mean the stuff didn’t work.

And the new bombers worked, too—at least if you didn’t crash them trying to get them to work. The pilots flew their planes and aircrews west toward the border between Russian and Byelorussia. That they landed at airstrips still inside the Russia Federation gave the lie to the swill that poured out of radio speakers. No, things weren’t going nearly so well as the Soviet government wanted people to think.

English and French reinforcements for the Nazis hadn’t got here yet, either. What would happen when they joined the Germans and Poles? Nothing good, not if you were a Soviet citizen.

Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky seemed to know his business. He wasn’t a drunken blowhard like Colonel Borisov or a hopeless loser like the fellow who’d briefly given Mouradian orders in the Far East.

“The Nazis are still coming forward,” he told the newly assembled men of his newly assembled squadron. He didn’t bother mentioning the Poles. In his place, Stas wouldn’t have, either. Tomashevsky went on, “We can’t stop them all by ourselves, but we can hurt them. That will give the Red Army a better chance to do
its
job.”