The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (43 page)

He found the place without too much trouble. Since the signs in Bialystok were in two languages he couldn’t read—one with an alphabet
as meaningless to him as Hindustani—he took that for a good omen. The next interesting question was whether Sofia would be working when he walked into the tavern. Had he come all this way just to sit around and drink mineral water or coffee?

But there she was, small and dark and slim and maddening. “Oh. It’s you,” she said, as if he hadn’t been away blowing up Russian panzers for weeks. “Well, come on over here and sit down.”

She led him to a little table off in a corner. “What? I don’t deserve a better seat than this?” he said, more or less joking.

Sofia, plainly, wasn’t joking at all. She shook her head. “Why should you? You don’t spend enough cash to make it worthwhile to put you anywhere else. Coffee! Fizzy water!” She rolled her eyes at what they did to profit margins. The expression and the logic behind it certainly made him think of her as a Jew. They didn’t make her any less attractive, though, even if they should have.

Doing his best to sound reasonable, he answered, “I don’t get drunk and tear the place up and break things, either.”

“We can collect on that—sometimes, anyhow. I suppose you’ll want coffee now.” Without waiting to find out whether she supposed accurately or not, she bustled away. Hans-Ulrich admired her trim ankles. He’d never particularly cared about ankles before—things got more interesting as you moved north—but he made an exception here. Hers were turned on a superior lathe.

She came back with the coffee, set it down on the table, and stood there waiting. He gave her money. That made her turn to go again. Before she could disappear, he spoke quickly: “What time do you get off today?”

“Past your bedtime,” Sofia said. Glancing at the steaming cup she’d brought, she added, “Past your bedtime no matter how much coffee you drink.”

“But I came all the way back here to see you,” Hans-Ulrich said. “There’s sure nothing else in Bialystok that would have brought me back.”

“Why is this supposed to be my problem?” Sure as the devil, Sofia specialized in being impossible.

“Because—” Hans-Ulrich hesitated.
Because I love you
would make her laugh in his face.
Because I want to go to bed with you
was more honest, but too likely to get him slapped. Hoping the hesitation wasn’t too
noticeable, he tried again: “Because you’re the most interesting girl I’ve met since I don’t know when.”

A black eyebrow leaped toward her hairline. “You talk prettier than most of them, but you mean the same thing.” Somebody with an empty beer stein banged it on the table and shouted for her. “I’ve got to go,” she said, and she did.

Hans-Ulrich sipped the coffee. It was better than what a field kitchen made but, he thought, not so good as it had been the last time he was here. The war was rough on everybody, at the front or not.

He watched Sofia. He bought more coffee, and more coffee, and more coffee still. If she kept working till after his bedtime now, she’d be doing a twenty-four-hour shift and then some. He got rid of the used coffee in a crowded, odorous
pissoir
made more cramped still by the infantry sergeant passed out next to the urinal.

A panzer crew and some foot soldiers started punching one another. Hans-Ulrich helped break up the brawl and throw them out. Then he went back to his table.

After a while, Sofia came over with a fresh cup of coffee. She had his rhythm down, all right. Pausing, she said, “Why should I want anything to do with you? You’re a German. That makes you trouble with a capital T.”

He shook his head. “Nah. Germans in Poland are only trouble with a small t. That’s what your government decided. Russians are trouble with a capital T.”

“I don’t care what the government decided. The government is stupid,” Sofia answered, which could have sent her to a camp had she been overheard in Germany. “Germans are always trouble.”

“This isn’t about Germans and Poles or Germans and Jews or Germans and Portuguese, if you happen to be Portuguese,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It’s about you and me, that’s all.”

“Easier for the one who drops the bombs to talk like that than for the poor so-and-so they land on.”

How did she know he dropped bombs? He supposed she could find out. Or she might have been using a figure of speech. Before he could find any sort of comeback, a shouted call for a refill sent her scurrying
away. He sipped his coffee. His eyes were wide, wide open. Not quite benzedrine, but not so far away.

The tavern stayed crowded no matter how late it got. Sofia accidentally on purpose spilled a mug of beer on a German who tried reaching up under her skirt. The guy’s friends laughed at him, so he couldn’t get mad. He was drunk and hopeful, not really determined. Lucky for him, too, because Hans-Ulrich would have murdered him if he’d tried to take it out on the barmaid.

And then Sofia came to his table without a cup of coffee in her hand. “All right,
Herr
Hotshot. I’m off work,” she said, her sharp chin lifted in defiance. “Now what?”

Hans-Ulrich sprang to his feet. He was so surprised and happy, he wondered why he didn’t bounce off the ceiling. He offered her his arm. The way she took it was more challenge than anything else. He didn’t care. All he cared about was that she took it. “Let’s both find out,” he said.

“NIGHT BOMBING.”
Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko spoke the words as if they tasted bad. “This is what we are reduced to until we can reequip with Pe-2s or some other new bombers. We serve the Soviet Union, of course.” Plainly, he wished the squadron could serve the country some other way.

Sergei Yaroslavsky understood his superior’s pride. He had trouble sharing it, though. Enough was enough. Enough, in fact, was too much. Against the
Luftwaffe
’s fighters, the SB-2 had had its day. It was as simple as that. Too many of the faces listening to Ponamarenko were fresh and new. Too many veterans who’d served as long as Sergei were dead, shot down by fighter planes they couldn’t escape.

Yes, night bombing was second-line duty. But it was something the SB-2 could still manage. Finding enemy aircraft at night was largely a matter of luck. Bombing by night was also a matter of luck, with navigation and aim so uncertain. But what about it? The explosives were bound to come down on somebody’s head, and the somebody would more likely than not be a Nazi.

Kerosene lanterns and men with electric torches marked the edges of the runway. “Should be fun finding this place again in the dark, shouldn’t it?” Lieutenant Federov remarked.

Sergei had been thinking the same thing. To keep from dwelling on it, he told his bomb-aimer, “Well, if they lit it up like peacetime, the Germans would find it before we got back.”

From Moscow all the way to Germany’s western border, no one showed a light at night. You didn’t want to give the other side a free shot at you, any more than you wanted to hand the other team a penalty kick in a football match. But the lights were on again in England and France. They didn’t worry about German bombers any more. They didn’t need to: the capitalists had made common cause with the Fascists to destroy the building workers’ and peasants’ paradise here.

It won’t happen
, Sergei told himself.
We won’t let it happen
. The Red Army kept yielding ground, but falling back before the enemy worried him much less than it would have worried, say, a Frenchman. In France, you could fall back only so far till you ran out of real estate.

That wasn’t a problem in Russia. Trading space for time had been a Russian specialty ever since invaders started coming out of the west—pretty much forever, in other words. Napoleon made it to Moscow, but much joy he had from his homecoming. Sergei didn’t think the Germans would get that far, even with help from the other degenerate Western powers. And if they should, he didn’t think they wanted to fight through a Russian winter.

Once they were airborne, an order came over the radio: “Switch off navigation lights!” Sergei flipped the switch. The command came sooner than he’d expected. He hoped the SB-2s wouldn’t collide with each other in the darkness. He saw no bursts of flame or midair explosions, so he supposed they didn’t. He would have waited longer than Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko had all the same.

The bombers droned west. A fat gibbous moon spilled milky light over the
Rodina
far below. There was the front. It couldn’t be anything else. Those sullen fires down on the ground, the plumes of smoke climbing into the air … “Any target we hit from now on, it belongs to the Nazis,” Federov said.

“Any military target,” Sergei agreed absently. He was studying the compass. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the copilot and bomb-aimer blink. If Federov was NKVD, as he’d wondered, should he have said that? Too late to worry about it now. And how many Byelorussians had the German hordes overrun? Millions, surely, and some Great Russians and Ukrainians as well.

Russians called Germans
Nemtsi
—the tongue-tied ones. To ancient Russian ears, the German language was sense-free, senseless babble. In German,
Slav
and
slave
both came from the same word. Even in the days when they were forming their speech, the Germans had thought their eastern neighbors fit only for doing what they told them to do.

All that went back more than a thousand years—how much more, Sergei didn’t know. He did know not much had changed since.

The navigation lights were out, but he found he could still spot the flames in the exhaust from the other SB-2s’ engines. No doubt they could see his plane the same way. That was good—he supposed. If he saw other ghostly shapes, other exhaust fires, coming out of the west … He shook his head, refusing to borrow trouble.

Compass and airspeed indicator were his only navigation tools. Calling that crude gave it too much credit. “We’re about where we ought to be,” he said at last, hoping he was right. “Let’s give them our present and head back to the airstrip.”

“Sounds good to me,” Federov said.

Sergei shouted into the speaking tube: “Bombs away, Ivan!”

“Right!” the Chimp answered. The bombs fell free. The SB-2 got livelier. “Bombs fucking away!” Kuchkov reported.

“Then I’m getting out of here.” Sergei hadn’t seen any German night fighters, and he didn’t want to, either. He hauled the bomber around in the sky and headed back toward the airstrip. Even more than he had on taking off, he hoped he’d be able to find it.

A moment later, he started hoping he’d get back to Russia
to
find it. German flak woke up all at once. The Nazis had no searchlights, the way they would while defending their own cities. They were firing by ear and by guess, gauging height and position from the sound of the bombers’ engines.

Fire flashed on the ground as the antiaircraft guns went off. Red and yellow streaks were tracer rounds rising through the air. And the bursts reminded Sergei of the booms when skyrockets turned nights into magic. Here he was, in the middle of one of the fanciest fireworks shows he’d ever imagined.

A fragment clanged into the fuselage. The Germans might be guessing where his plane was, but they made goddamn good guessers. The longer the flak went on, the scarier it got. “You all right back there?” Sergei called to Sergeant Kuchkov.

“Bet your cock I am. Pussy missed me by twenty motherfucking centimeters, easy. Those bitches can’t shoot any better than they can fart.” Kuchkov swore as naturally as he breathed, and a lot more artistically.

“Well, good,” Sergei said, making the bomber jink to help confuse—he hoped—the gunners’ aim. “Any damage to the plane?”

“Nothing the groundcrew assholes can’t fix pretty easy,” the Chimp replied, and Sergei had to be content with that.

After crossing the front, Sergei picked up a little antiaircraft fire from his own side, but only a little. He’d been thinking about football before. Now he did again.
Come on, fellows. You don’t want an own goal here
. What Ivan Kuchkov called the Russians manning those guns should have unmanned them from several thousand meters.

Sergei peered down toward the ground, looking for the rectangle of lights he’d left—or for any other rectangle of lights he happened to see. They wouldn’t mark a football pitch, but an airstrip.

He almost yipped in surprise when he saw one. Was he that good a navigator, or just that lucky tonight? As he descended, he grew more and more convinced this really was the runway from which he’d set out. The lights were arranged the same way, anyhow, and he didn’t think the authorities would have standardized that.

He lowered the landing gear and put down as gently as if the dirt strip were paved with eggs. Night landings were not for the faint of heart. He was proud of this one, and prouder when Federov said, “We’ve come in rougher than that plenty of times in broad daylight.”

“We have,” Sergei agreed. He tried to sound as if that were routine,
but couldn’t even convince himself that he managed it. If those bombs had actually hurt the Nazis, this would be a perfect run.

HANS-ULRICH RUDEL
was happy in the way only a man who’s wanted a woman for a long time and finally got her into bed can be happy. He was pretty much an idiot, in other words, but a sated and smiling idiot. This was the best furlough of his life. He was sure it was the best furlough of anybody’s life. Yes, he was pretty much an idiot for the time being.

Sofia, he discovered after asking eight or ten times (definitely an idiot), was half-Jewish: a
Mischling
First Class, as the
Reich
classified racial categories. She thought of herself as a Jew, though. “My father’s a miserable drunk,” she said. “Why should I want to be like him?”

Sounds like a Pole
, Hans-Ulrich thought, as if there’d never been a German drunk in the history of the world. Although an idiot, he wasn’t quite an imbecile: he didn’t say what he was thinking out loud. He did ask, “What does your mother do?”

“She went to Palestine,” Sofia answered. “With the war, I haven’t heard much from her the past year or so. After she broke up with my father, she got the Zionist itch. I think she was making up for marrying a
goy
, but try and tell her that.” She rolled her eyes. “Try and tell my mother anything. Good luck!”