The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (49 page)

“Maybe things will pick up again after the hard freeze comes and we aren’t stuck in the mud all the goddamn time.” Witt tried to look on the bright side of things.

“Yeah, maybe.” Adi didn’t sound as if he believed it. Theo didn’t believe it, either. Just then, a tiny rill trickled down the dirt they’d thrown up from under the panzer and into their little cave. Adi sighed theatrically. “Forty days and forty nights—isn’t that right?”

It was right in the Biblical sense. It was also about how long the fall rains in Russia would last. The panzer crewmen glumly emerged into a world that had changed.

The rain pattered down out of a sky that reminded Theo of nothing so much as the bellies of a lot of dirty sheep. It cut visibility to a couple of hundred meters at best. Beyond that, everything was lost in a curtain of murk and mist. A hooded crow on the roof of a burnt-out barn sent the Germans a nasty look, as if to say the evil weather was their fault.

Sorry, bird
, Theo thought.
It’s not us. Our generals will be tearing out
their hair—the ones who still have hair, anyhow. The rest will throw down their monocles and cuss
. His opinion of the
Wehrmacht
’s senior commanders was not high. His opinion of other armies’ leadership was even lower.

Adi stooped and eyed the Panzer II’s tracks. Sure as hell, it was getting muddy. Sure as hell, the panzer was sinking into the mud. The driver mournfully shook his head. “Going anywhere in this crap will be fun, won’t it?” he said.

Witt nodded to Theo. “Get on the horn with the regiment,” he said. “See what we’re supposed to do today. If we’re lucky, they’ll tell us to hold in place.”

“Right,” Theo said. The panzer commander didn’t sound as if he expected them to be lucky. Since Theo didn’t, either, he just climbed into the panzer and warmed up the radio set.

When he asked headquarters what the day’s orders were, the sergeant or lieutenant at the other end of the connection seemed surprised he needed to. “No changes since last night,” the fellow back at HQ replied. “The advance continues. Why?”

“It’s raining,” Theo said. For all he knew, it wasn’t back there. Or, if it was, the deep thinkers at headquarters might not have noticed.

“We go forward,” the man at headquarters said. Theo duly relayed his words of wisdom to Witt and Adi.

“Well, we try,” remarked the panzer commander, who had a firmer grip on reality than anybody back at HQ. He nodded to Adi. “Start her up.”

“Right you are,” Stoss said. The Maybach engine belched itself awake. It should have had more horsepower, but it was reliable enough.

The panzer should have had more armor. It should have had a better gun. It should have been a Panzer III, in other words. But there still weren’t enough IIIs and IVs to go around, so the smaller IIs and even Is soldiered on.

Witt stood head and shoulders out of the cupola. He draped his shelter half so it kept most of the rain off of him and out of the fighting compartment. “We’re kicking up a wake,” he reported, sounding more amused than annoyed.

Theo, as usual, couldn’t see out. He believed Witt, though. The engine labored to push the panzer through the mud. The tracks dug in hard. Even through the panzer’s steel sides, Theo could hear the squelching.

And the going only got worse. Theirs wasn’t the only panzer trying to use the road. The more traffic it took, the more ruts filled with water and turned to soup. “I wonder if we’d do better in the fields,” Adi said.

“Try it if you want to,” Witt told him.

“Damned if I won’t,” the driver said, and he did. The panzer picked up speed—for a little while. Then it came to a stretch that German or Russian artillery had already chewed up. Rainwater had soaked into the shell holes, producing little gluey puddles. Adi carefully picked his way between them. “We’re using more gas than we have been, too,” he grumbled.

Again, Theo believed him. The engine was working much harder than it had when the road was dry. How anyone was supposed to fight in weather like this … He consoled himself by remembering that the Russians would have just as much trouble seeing enemies and moving as his own side did.

That turned out not to be quite true. The Panzer II was fighting to get out of a mudhole when Witt let out a horrified squawk and all but fell back into the turret. He frantically traversed it to the left. “Goddamn Russian panzer!” he explained. “Fucker’s plowing through the mud like it isn’t even there.”

How fast were the Ivans turning their turret this way? Theo’s gut knotted. A 45mm shell slamming through the thin side armor might answer the question any second now. Witt started shooting: one 20mm round after another, as fast as the toy cannon would fire. Then he switched to the coaxial machine gun, and Theo breathed again.

“Bastard’s burning,” the panzer commander said. “I think the machine gun got one of the crew, but the rest are still on the loose.” He laughed shakily. “Never a dull moment, is there? … How are we doing, Adi?”

“We’re fucking stuck, that’s how,” Stoss answered. “We need a tow.”

“Right,” Witt said. “Theo, get on the radio. Let ’em know.”

“I’m doing it,” Theo said. He hoped whatever recovery vehicle the regiment sent out wouldn’t bog down before it got here. And he
hoped—he really, really hoped—no more Russian panzers would come along first.

RASPUTITSA
. Russian had a word for the season of mud that came along every spring and fall. The spring
rasputitsa
was worse, because it didn’t mark rain alone: the accumulated winter snow melted, making the mud deeper and gooier yet. But the fall mud time was bad enough.

No planes flew. During the winter, fighters and even bombers landed with skis in place of wheels. Even that didn’t work during the
rasputitsa
. To get airborne and come down again, a plane had to use a paved runway. As far as Sergei Yaroslavsky knew, the Soviet Union didn’t have any.

The Germans were grounded, too. Poland had a few all-weather airstrips, but the front had moved too far east for them to matter. Sergei chuckled sourly. Advantages to everything, even defeat.

For the next few weeks, the flyers had nothing to do but sit around, play cards, and drink. A Red Air Force man sober through the
rasputitsa
probably had something wrong with his liver. When the hard freezes came, when planes could take off and land again, that would be time enough to get your nose out of the vodka jug.

Now … Now Sergei ate and slept and drank and argued and listened to the radio and argued some more. Even drunk, he was careful about what he said. NKVD men got drunk too, but they had an ugly habit of remembering what they’d heard then even after they sobered up.

The war ground on even while Sergei and the rest of the Red Air Force men perforce vegetated. That was why he listened to the radio: to find out what was going on while he couldn’t do anything about it. He pored over the copies of
Pravda
and
Izvestia
and
Red Star
that came to the airstrip, even if they commonly got there a week after they were printed, their cheap paper already starting to yellow.

No one wanted to come straight out and say so, but the Germans and Poles were still pushing forward—not so fast as before, but they were. The first sighting of French troops raised a fine fury on the radio and then, after the usual delays, in the papers, too. The Party line raised
echoes of the civil war after the October Revolution when the capitalist powers allied with the reactionary Whites to try to murder the Soviet Union at birth. They’d failed then, and they would fail now … if you listened to Stalin’s propagandists, at any rate.

Back then, Japan had joined with England, France, America, and the Whites against the USSR. For a long time, the radio had made this war with Japan seem more of the same thing.
We’re attacked on all sides, so we need to fight and work twice as hard
, was the message.

That had been the message, anyhow. But a two-paragraph item in
Izvestia
that Sergei almost ignored said Foreign Commissar Litvinov was on a diplomatic mission to Khabarovsk. It didn’t say what kind of diplomatic mission or with whom he was conducting his diplomacy. But still … Khabarovsk!

You had to know where Khabarovsk was for the story to make any sense. As it happened, Sergei did. When he was a little kid, some school lesson had praised Khabarovsk, the jewel of eastern Siberia. The so-called jewel was probably one more Soviet industrial town, a quarter of the way around the world from where he sat now. That wasn’t the point.

The point was, why would Maxim Litvinov be conducting diplomacy in Khabarovsk if not to talk some more with the Japanese? He wouldn’t meet British or French officials there—that was for sure. But Khabarovsk was pretty close to Japan—and even closer to Japan’s recent Siberian conquests. Nothing else made sense.

Which proved … what, exactly? Not a damned thing, as Sergei also knew. He was only a flyer, making guesses from what the government deigned to tell the people. What the men who ran things knew that they weren’t telling … He could guess about that, too, but he was much too likely to be wrong.

Only he wasn’t wrong, not this time. One very wet, very muddy, very hung-over morning, the radio newsreader followed “Moscow speaking” with “I have the honor to present an important announcement from General Secretary Stalin concerning the course of the struggle against imperialism.”

Sergei went over to the samovar and got himself a glass of hot, strong, sweet tea. Then he poured a hefty slug of vodka into it. Put that all together and it might take the edge off his headache. He wasn’t the
only flyer medicating himself that way, either—nowhere close. Some skipped the tea.

Then the newsreader said, “A definitive and lasting peace has been reached between the Empire of Japan and the workers and peasants of the USSR. The two nations, recognizing their common interests, have decided to make permanent the cease-fire to which they agreed when Foreign Commissar Litvinov traveled to Japan this summer. They will end their conflict on the basis of current positions. The new borders will be demilitarized on both sides to a distance of twenty-five kilometers. Each nation also pledges neutrality in the other’s current and future conflicts. The Foreign Commissar has expressed great satisfaction as a result of the formal termination of hostilities.”

“Good. That’s good,” Lieutenant Colonel Ponamarenko said. “In fact, very good.
Ochen khorosho.
” He repeated the last two words with somber satisfaction as he stubbed out one
papiros
and lit another. He seemed to be one of those people who thought nicotine eased a pain in the hair—a term Sergei’d heard from a fellow flyer who’d served in Spain. It fit, all right. He’d smoked a couple of cigarettes himself, but just because he smoked, not because he thought they made much difference to his morning-afters.

Several flyers nodded. Even under Socialism, you couldn’t go far wrong agreeing with your squadron commander—and, more to the point, being seen to agree with him. Sergei only wished he could. But the newsreader had left too much out. He hadn’t said where the new borders were, for instance. That argued that Japan had seized more of southeastern Siberia than anyone cared to admit in public. The announcer hadn’t said anything about returning prisoners of war, either.

Maybe none of that mattered. With the Soviet Union officially able to concentrate on the west, Stalin probably planned to hang on here and renew the fight in the Far East when he saw the chance. He couldn’t let Japan hold on to Vladivostok … could he?

And what would Japan do now? She could put more soldiers into China. She plainly thought of the vast, disorderly country the way England thought of India: a place to exploit, with plenty of natives to do the hard work for her.

Come to think of it, Hitler thought of Russia that way. What else was
he doing here but grabbing land and slaves? If he won this war, he would get his way. The thing to do, then, was make sure he didn’t.

Sergei took another swig of vodka-laced tea. His headache was backing off—some, anyhow. He couldn’t fight the Nazis now, not with the best will in the world. The
rasputitsa
made sure of that. It left him feeling more than commonly useless.

It was hard to remember, but across the sea lay a country where none of this mattered. The United States was the greatest capitalist nation in the world, and it was at peace with everybody. That struck Sergei as most unfair—all the more so when he was hung over. The Americans just sat there watching the rest of the world tear itself to pieces. As far as the pilot could tell, they didn’t care. Why should they? No matter who won, they got rich selling grain and guns.

Something should happen to them. It would serve them right
, he thought. Then he laughed at himself. What could happen to the United States? The Americans had beaten their natives far more completely than the English had won in India or the Japanese in China. The Atlantic and Pacific shielded them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. They even seemed immune to the inexorable working of the historical dialectic.

He brought himself up sharply. The Americans might seem immune, but they weren’t. Nobody was. The revolution would come to the United States, too. The big capitalists and exploiters would go to the wall, as they had in the USSR. It would happen in England and France, too—and in Germany, no matter what the Hitlerites thought or how little they liked it.

But when? The dialectic didn’t speak to that. For the USSR’s sake, Sergei hoped it would be soon.