Two Fronts (21 page)

“Well, fuck me!” Willi said, amazement and relief warring in his voice. “It worked. It really worked!”

“Damned if it didn’t,” Pfaff agreed. “I’d kiss you if you weren’t so ugly and if you didn’t need a shave so bad.”

“So would I,” Arno Baatz said. “That was quick thinking, Dernen.” By the way he said them, the words tasted bad in his mouth, but say them he did.

“Yeah, well …” Willi scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt like a schoolboy embarrassed on the playground. It wasn’t as if he
wanted
praise from Awful Arno. After a moment, he went on, “You see T-34s coming down on you, you’d damn well better come up with something in a hurry.”

“They should put you up for a medal.” Pfaff looked pointedly at Corporal Baatz. Awful Arno pretended not to see him.

Willi cared not a sausage casing for medals. He already wore the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class. He couldn’t imagine
not
winning that one, not when he’d been a
Frontschwein
since the war started. If they pinned the Iron Cross First Class on him, he didn’t see how his life would change. And his stunt wouldn’t have rated the Knight’s Cross even if he were an officer rather than a lousy
Obergefreiter
. “Hey, we’re still here,” he said. “Who cares about anything else?”

FRANCE DISGUSTED ARISTIDE
Demange. Well, when you got right down to it, damn near everything disgusted Demange. He supposed that meant he ought to feel at home again. He didn’t, though.

French civilians had always disgusted him. He’d been all for bashing the Nazis in the teeth as soon as they showed they were growing some. If the French army had moved when the
Boche
’s troops marched into the Rhineland …

It didn’t happen. France huddled behind the Maginot Line. Plenty of civilians—mostly rich ones, but not all—wanted to hop into bed with Hitler. Others wanted to roll on their backs and show the Germans their bellies. Hardly anyone wanted to take them on, dammit. Not even the French officer corps wanted another war with Germany. The officers didn’t trust England to help them out, and knew they had no prayer without her.

Well, here it was heading toward four years after France found herself in the war whether she much wanted to be or not. The civilians still hated it. From everything Demange could tell, most of them would rather have kept on fighting Stalin.

“No way in hell the Ivans would ever come this far,” said a gray-haired fellow drinking up his paycheck in an
estaminet
not far from the border with Belgium. “But the damned
Boches
, the
Boches
are right here.” In Demange’s ears, his northern accent made him sound halfway toward being a
Boche
himself.

The lieutenant felt like smashing in his stupid face. He knew that would get him talked about. Now that he was an officer, it wouldn’t do much more. At worst, he’d get busted down to sergeant again. If he did, he’d be happier than he was now.

But military discipline was a formidable thing. Instead of kicking the gray-haired
con
in the belly and then in the chops as he folded up like a concertina, Demange stubbed out one Gitane, lit another, and merely blew smoke at the bastard. “They won’t be so close once we push ’em back,” he growled.

“Once we do
what
?” By the way the local gaped, Demange might have suddenly started spouting Hausa or Cambodian. When the man spoke again, it was with exaggerated reason, as if to an obvious lunatic: “Come on,
Monsieur le Lieutenant
. What are the odds of that?”

He could read Demange’s rank badges. Well, not many Frenchmen of his age wouldn’t be able to. He’d probably done his time during the last war as a typist somewhere a hundred kilometers behind the line, pinching the cute secretaries on the ass every chance he got and worrying more about a dose of the clap than about gas or shell fragments.

“We can do it.” Demange tried his own version of reason: “Honest to God, man, we can. The Germans are up to their chins in Russia. They couldn’t do two fronts last time, and they can’t now, either.”

“They can bomb the crap out of us, though. They already have,” the other guy said.

“As close as you ever got to them, I bet,” Demange retorted. So much for reason.

“I did my bit last time,” the local said. Demange had already figured that out. The local’s tone disgusted him, too: full of a righteousness he’d already heard too goddamn often.

“Yeah, you did your bit, and then you forgot about your
patrie
and hoped like hell the old
patrie
would keep on forgetting about you. Your kind makes me sick,” Demange snarled.

“What do you want to do about it?” The gray-haired man reached for the bottle of
pinard
on the zinc-topped bar in front of him, so he wasn’t altogether a virgin at these games.

But he’d never brawled with anybody like Demange, either. Pasting on as broad and friendly a smile as his ferretlike face would hold, the veteran set a soft hand on the other man’s shoulder. At the same time, he spoke mildly: “Well, pal, it’s like this—”

Distracted by touch and voice, the local never saw the sharp, short left that buried itself in his soft midsection. “Oof!” the other fellow said, and doubled over. Demange didn’t kick him while he was down, but he sure did kick him on the way down. The local would need some expensive dentistry real soon, but Demange’s boots were thick enough that he didn’t care—the kick didn’t hurt him one bit.

The bartender yelled and reached under the bar for whatever kind of peacemaker he kept there. Demange was too busy to worry about the fine details. One of the gray-haired man’s buddies grabbed him and spun him around. That was a mistake—the guy should have hit him from behind. Demange butted him with the top of his head. That did hurt some, but his skull was harder than the other clown’s nose. He felt it flatten out. This
con
hadn’t been pretty to begin with, but he’d be uglier now. Demange slugged him for good measure.

Somebody did tackle him from behind then. A split second later, another soldier hauled the local off him and treated the bastard like a rugby ball. The technique of the
savate
left something to be desired, but never its sincerity.

A split second after that, the whole crowded
estaminet
went berserk. There were more local tradesmen and farmers than soldiers in the joint, but the soldiers were mostly younger, in better shape, and more practiced at helping one another. They held their own and then some.

Demange didn’t enjoy bar brawls. He didn’t shy away from them, but he would rather have drunk quietly and then picked up a barmaid or gone to the local
maison de tolérance
. One thing you had to give officers’ brothels: the girls were fresher and prettier than they were at enlisted men’s houses. Less jaded? Well, you couldn’t have everything.

Just because he didn’t enjoy bar brawls didn’t mean he wasn’t sudden incapacitation on two legs when he found himself in one. As far as he was concerned, the Marquis of Queensbury was nothing but some English fairy. The only rule he recognized was to do unto others before they could do unto him.

Furious whistles squealed outside the
estaminet
. “The
flics
!” someone yelled needlessly. The cops waded into the fray, which then became that rare and ugly thing, a three-cornered fracas. The
flics
had truncheons. They were—presumably—sober. But there weren’t enough of them for those advantages to help as much as they’d no doubt hoped.

In short order, some of the soldiers and some of the locals had truncheons, while some of the
flics
didn’t. A policeman went out through the front window. Since it was covered over with plywood, he probably didn’t much fancy that. Demange didn’t think
he
would have.

He rabbit-punched somebody on his way to the door. The evening had turned more strenuous than he really cared for. Once he pushed his way out past the blackout curtain, he paused and lit a Gitane. If German night bombers could spot the flare of a match from 6,000 meters, they deserved to score a hit. After he blew out the match, even the cigarette’s coal seemed bright.

He got called on the carpet a couple of days later. He’d expected he would. “That was quite a scrum in the
estaminet
,” remarked the mustachioed colonel who commanded the regiment.

“Yes, sir,” Demange said woodenly, and not another word.

“The civilians are hopping mad,” the colonel observed. Demange stood mute, at stiff attention. The colonel’s right eyebrow quirked. “You were there,
n’est-ce pas?
”

“Yes, sir,” Demange repeated, with, again, no more.

“Have any idea what touched off the riot? That’s what it was, or near enough.”

“No, sir.”

“I’ve heard—just heard, mind you—you might have had something to do with it.”

After a few seconds, Demange decided merely standing mute wouldn’t do. He grudged the regimental CO a shrug.

The colonel snorted. “All right. Get the hell out of here. And stay out of trouble for a while, you hear me? If you’d kicked that one bugger any harder, you might have broken his neck, and then I’d have a tougher time sweeping all this
merde
under the rug.”

With mechanical precision, Demange saluted. He did a smart about-turn and walked out of the colonel’s tent. He didn’t crack a smile till he got outside. It had all gone about the way he’d figured. They wouldn’t do anything to an officer who hadn’t committed murder, not in wartime they wouldn’t. Chuckling, Demange lit a fresh Gitane.

ANASTAS MOURADIAN EYED
with undisguised admiration the planes that shared the airstrip with his squadron of Pe-2s. He whistled and silently clapped his hands. “Now those babies,” he said, trying to sound slangy in Russian, “those babies mean business.”

“The
Stormoviks
?” another pilot said. “Bet your dick they do.” Only Russians could bring out
mat
as if born to it, because they damn well were.

What the Il-2 ground-attack planes really reminded Stas of were Stukas. They weren’t just the same. They didn’t have that vulture-like kink in the wing. They did boast retractable landing gear. They lacked the Stukas’ dive brakes, which let the German aircraft put their bombs right where they wanted them to go. Instead, the
Stormoviks
carried a cannon and lots of forward-facing machine guns, plus one that the rear gunner used, Stuka-style, to fire at enemies coming up from behind.

Like the Stuka (and like the Pe-2, come to that), the Il-2 looked as if it meant business. Maybe that was the long in-line engine
Stormoviks
and the German dive-bombers both used. Those gave both airplanes a sharklike profile. But the Ilyushins weren’t purpose-built dive-bombers, though they could carry bombs. Their main mission was to roar along at just above treetop height and shoot anything that moved.

“They did something sneaky with them.” The Russian flyer waved toward the closest
Stormovik
.

“Ah? Tell me more,” Stas said. The other fellow obviously wanted to do just that.

“You see the rear-firing machine gun?” the other pilot asked.

“
Da
.” Mouradian nodded.

“Well, what I hear is, when they first started flying against the Fritzes, when the rear gunner got it, he’d slump down onto the breech of the gun, and his weight would make the barrel point straight up. The fucking Germans aren’t dumb, damn them to hell. When they saw that, they knew they could attack from behind without worrying about getting shot at. Cost some of our pilots their necks. Now there’s a gearing mechanism in the gun mount so it won’t tell everybody in sight when the poor asshole in the back seat stops one.”

“How about that?” Stas said, which was a safe thing to come out with almost any old time. The gearing system was clever: coldbloodedly clever. It struck him as a very Russian—or perhaps very Soviet—way to solve the problem. Protect the rear gunner better? That would add weight and degrade performance. But if a Nazi in a Messerschmitt couldn’t be sure the guy was wounded or dead, he might not bore in and shoot down the Il-2.

Yes, clever. Clever in a way that made Mouradian want to shiver. However much he wanted to, he didn’t. The Russian pilot wasn’t a man he knew well. He had no way to be sure the fellow didn’t report to the NKVD. (For that matter, you had no way to be sure your best friend, the guy who’d had your back since you were both four years old, didn’t report to the NKVD. The gulags were full of people whose best friends had sold them down the river. And some of those best friends had ended up in camps themselves. What went around came around, all right.)

“
Pilot’s
got good armor, though,” the Russian said.

Stas nodded again. The rear gunner might be expendable. the pilot wasn’t. He could bring back a
Stormovik
with a dead rear gunner … as long as the Fritzes didn’t realize the rear gunner’d bought his plot. Armor for the pilot. A gear mechanism for the gunner. Priorities. Russian priorities. Soviet priorities.

He figured the Il-2 pilots would have high morale. Why not? Their planes were made to chew up Germans, and looked as if they could do what they were made for very well.

How about the rear gunners? How enthusiastic would they be about flying into places where the
Luftwaffe
was strong? Mouradian snorted softly. If they didn’t like it, some Chekist would give them a bullet in the back of the neck and then go to supper without a backwards glance. You had a chance in a plane, which was more than you could say if you wound up in the infantry and got told to charge that machine-gun emplacement over there.

The Russian figured angles as if he were playing pool: “With these cocks flying low and us up high, Fritz’ll have to split his planes in half. That gives us a better chance to come home again, y’know? Anything that does that, I’m all for it.”

“Me, too.” Mouradian nodded one more time. Even in the Soviet Union, you were allowed to want to live. You weren’t always actually allowed to live: if the Germans didn’t do for you, the regime very well might. But it didn’t begrudge your wanting to. Such generosity! A lesser country would be incapable of it.