Two Fronts (32 page)

Pete McGill was always happy when the
Ranger
steamed out of Pearl and headed west. They were going out to give the Japs hell. Giving the Japs hell was what he wanted more than anything else on earth.

Some of the other Marines who served with him were less enthusiastic. “Man, those assholes, they can sink us, too,” a corporal named Barney Klinsmann said at breakfast the morning after they headed out on patrol. He shoveled corned-beef hash into his face as if he thought they’d outlaw the stuff tomorrow. Some guys needed to get their sea legs under them before they started stuffing themselves like that. Not him.

“Fuck ’em,” Pete said flatly. “You don’t think we’ll lick ’em, fuck you, too. In the heart.”

Klinsmann surged to his feet. Pete was big and as solid as he could be after his injuries—he’d worked hard putting muscle back on. The other guy had a couple of inches and twenty pounds on him even so. He didn’t care. He stood, too. “Nobody talks to me that way, you bastard,” Klinsmann growled.

Other leathernecks grabbed them and kept them from going at each other. “Take an even strain, the both of youse,” Sergeant Cullum said. “We’re supposed to be fighting the slanties, remember?”

“I remember,” Pete said. “This bum, he wants to hide under his bunk instead.” He tried to point at Klinsmann, but the Marines holding his arms wouldn’t let go.

“Bullshit,” the bigger man said. “I just said we gotta watch ourselves. And we do, on account of this here is the only carrier in the Pacific what still floats. The only American carrier, I mean. The Japs, they got a shit-pot full.”

“Enough, dammit.” Cullum let his impatience show. “Am I gonna hafta talk to an officer or somethin’?”

That subdued both Pete and Barney Klinsmann, as he must have known it would. Squabbles between noncoms weren’t worth getting excited about—till an officer noticed them or had them brought to his attention. Officers could throw the book at you. Pete often thought the book was the only reason officers existed.

He quit struggling against the men who held him. So did Klinsmann. Cautiously, their fellow Marines turned them loose. They both settled down to their interrupted breakfasts. Sergeant Cullum beamed beatifically at one and all.

As they walked out of the galley, Pete spoke in a low voice: “You know that little compartment aft of the portside heads, the one where they stow the mops and brushes and shit like that?”

“Oh, fuck, yes,” Klinsmann answered, also quietly. “What time you wanna be there?”

“How about 0200 tomorrow?” Pete said. “Not like we need a bunch of busybodies around.”

“You got that right,” the other man said. “See you then.”

When Pete officially slid out of his bunk at 0530, one eye was almost swollen shut. He had a cut lip and a broken bottom eyetooth. His ribs felt as if someone had been kicking them. Well, someone had. They didn’t seem broken, though, so that was okay. He dry-swallowed a couple of Bayer’s finest, not that they’d help one hell of a lot. He didn’t feel a day over ninety-seven.

Sergeant Cullum raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You go and trip over the deck rivets again?” he inquired.

“That’s right.” Pete moved his mouth as little as he could. Talking hurt. So did breathing, come to that.

“What happened to Barney?” Cullum asked.

“Barney who?” Pete answered, deadpan. “You givin’ the deck rivets names now? That’s a little Asiatic, you want to know what I think.”

“I don’t want to know what you think. I don’t even want to know
if
you think,” the senior noncom said. “C’mon. Let’s go get some chow. And some joe. I run on joe like it’s gasoline.”

So did Pete. So did half—more than half—the other leathernecks and swabbies on the
Ranger
. The stuff they served in the galley wasn’t always good, but it was always strong. It was always hot, too. Aspirins or no aspirins, drinking it made Pete’s lips and the less visible injuries inside his mouth hurt like hell. The salt he sprinkled on his scrambled eggs and the salt already in his slice of ham were no fun, either. He ate stolidly just the same, keeping his eyes down on his own tray.

Other Marines kept looking at him. Well, his battered puss invited looks. The leathernecks kept looking around for Barney Klinsmann, too. Klinsmann was nowhere to be seen.

Very softly, Sergeant Cullum asked, “You didn’t go and kill him, didja?”

“Kill who?” Pete said. “That deck rivet you gave a name to?” But he gingerly shook his head. That hurt, too. Everything today hurt. He hoped the Japs would leave them alone till tomorrow, or even the day after. Right this minute, he wasn’t worth the paper he was printed on.

But, as people and countries often found reason to say, you shoulda seen the other guy.

Eventually—after loading up on ham and eggs of his own—Cullum called down to sick bay. “You got a leatherneck name of Klinsmann down there?” he asked the pharmacist’s mate on the other end of the line.

“What’s he say?” Three or four Marines asked the same thing at the same time.

He waved them to silence, listening to what the pharmacist’s mate was telling him. When he hung up, he said, “Barney’s in there, awright. He says he tripped and fell down a stairway on his face. He’s busted up enough, the sick-bay guys almost believe him. He musta hit every tread with his nose, though, or his teeth, or one eye or the other.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Pete said when Cullum finished. A long time ago, somebody—damned if he could remember who now, but it must’ve been somebody with brains—had told him that phrase was one of the handful of things you could come out with damn near anywhere and be okay.
How about that?
was another one, he’d said. There weren’t many, but knowing one or two came in handy all kinds of weird ways. Whoever the guy was, he’d known what he was talking about, sure as hell he had.

“Interesting,” Sergeant Cullum echoed. “Yeah. Right. Doesn’t sound like you’ll be taking any more shit from Klinsmann for a while.”

Pete shrugged, which also hurt. “Wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Huh.” Cullum’s grunt was redolent of skepticism. “Way the guy down in sick bay was going on, Barney’s fucking lucky nobody had to send a radiogram to his next of klins, man.”

“Ouch!” Pete said when the pun got home. Several of the other leathernecks groaned. McGill went on, “I didn’t know you went in for shit like that.” By the way he said it, he might have accused the other noncom of wearing frilly scanties under his uniform.

“Too goddamn bad,” Cullum answered. “I didn’t know you went in for ruining guys. It really does sound like Barney almost woke up dead this morning.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Pete said.

“Uh-huh. And rain makes applesauce. I don’t gotta be Sherlock Holmes to see what’s going on when you’re beat up and Klinsmann’s like he got run over by a tank.”

“I got nothin’ special against Klinsmann,” Pete said.

“Good thing you don’t! If you did, some shark’d be hunting for a toothpick right now, I bet.”

“Honest to God, all I wanna do is kill Japs,” Pete insisted. “Kill Japs an’ kill Japs an’ kill more Japs.”

Nobody argued with him. The other Marines didn’t seem even a little bit interested in saying anything that might provoke him. Barney Klinsmann hadn’t worried about it, and Barney was damn near pushing up a lily right this minute. Barney was a big, tough guy, too. And a hell of a lot of good that had done him. Pete went up onto the
Ranger
’s flight deck to look for more Japs to kill.

THE FALL
RASPUTITSA
meant Stas Mouradian’s Pe-2 wasn’t going anywhere for a while—unless, of course, it vanished into the bottomless mud. After rain turned to snow and mud froze hard, the air war would pick up again. And, for the first time since the war was new, Stas didn’t worry too much about going back into action.

He’d been fighting the Fascists from the very beginning. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia—four years ago now!—Mouradian had served as copilot and bomb-aimer on an SB-2 helping the Czechs from an airstrip in Slovakia. They’d called the SB-2 a fast bomber because it had proved able to outrun the biplane fighters it met in Spain. Stas had thought it would be able to do the same thing against whatever the Nazis threw at it.

Then he’d met the Bf-109. Unlike a lot of Soviet flyers who made the Messerschmitt’s acquaintance, he’d survived the first encounter. But that imaginary sound, as of breaking glass, stood for the shattering of his illusions.

Even in a Pe-2, a plane much more modern and much speedier than the old allegedly fast bomber, he still feared the 109. Bombers were made for dropping bombs. Fighters were made for shooting down other planes. If you asked a bomber to try to do a fighter’s job, you’d be sorry—although probably not for long.

When the air war did pick up again in a few weeks, chances were the
Luftwaffe
wouldn’t have enough 109s (or their fearsome new friends, the blunt-nosed, deadly FW-190s) to go after all the bombers the Red Air Force would throw at it. The Fritzes had to split their planes between this front and the revived one in the West.

Stas approved of that. The Germans would still throw up monstrous fireworks displays of flak, of course. Flak could kill you, too, but he didn’t worry about it the way he worried about 109s and 190s. Flak was impersonal, like the weather. If you weren’t lucky, some would hit your plane. But flak didn’t come hunting you in particular, the way fighter pilots did.

A lot of Russian flyers drank their way through the
rasputitsa
. To an Armenian’s way of looking at things, Russians drank at any excuse or none. And they didn’t drink for the taste of it. They drank till they got drunk or, at least as often, till they fell over.

Maybe that was because, when they drank, they drank vodka. Oh, they had beer, too, but they scorned it. What Russians mostly didn’t have was wine. Every valley in the Caucasus had its own vintage. Few of them made France look to her laurels, but a good many weren’t bad. A glass or two with a meal—that was civilized. Cultured, a Russian would say.

What was cultured about swilling vodka till you passed out? What was cultured about swilling it till you puked, or till you choked on your own puke? What was cultured about swilling it till you fell out a window, or fell through one you thought was open? Russians killed themselves like that all the time, and killed one another in drunken brawls.

You couldn’t talk about it with them, either. They wouldn’t listen, even if they happened to be sober at the time. The most they would ever say was
This is how we are. This is how we’ve been forever. We aren’t about to change, not for you and not for anybody
.

Change? It was to laugh. Russians reveled in the way they were. And, like any imperial nation, they tried to remake in their own image the peoples they ruled. Which other army in all the world gave its soldiers a daily ration of a hundred grams of high-octane vodka?

Oh, sure, soldiers all over the world drank. Considering what went into the soldier’s trade, how could you blame them? But, outside the Red Army, they drank unofficially. Inside the Red Army … Tanks ran on diesel fuel. Trucks ran on gasoline. Soldiers ran on vodka. That was how
Stavka
looked at things.

Full of such pointless reflections (and they were—that the Tsar had tried to impose prohibition during the last war was one of the reasons, and perhaps not the least of them, Tsars ruled Russia no longer), Stas slogged through the mud to the tent where flyers ate and drank (and drank, and drank) and listened to Radio Moscow.

To make sure flyers and other Soviet citizens listened only to Radio Moscow, to make sure no unauthorized opinions corrupted them, radio sets manufactured in the USSR received just the frequencies on which Radio Moscow and other Soviet stations broadcast. Somewhere (somewhere unauthorized, as a matter of fact), Stas had heard that Hitler admired the system when he learned about it, and wished Germany had one like it.

A samovar bubbled on a rickety table in one corner of the big tent. To give them their due, Russians always had tea handy. Sweet tea soothed a hangover if anything did. Tobacco smoke was thick enough to make Stas’ eyes water. Hard rolls, pork sausage, a pot of borscht, a pot of
shchi
if you felt like cabbage soup instead of beet soup … It wasn’t exciting, especially if you were an Armenian who expected more in the way of spices than dill and caraway seeds. But you could fill your belly.

Vodka bottles were making the rounds, too. No surprise there. They always did. No one could even think of complaining, not when the
rasputitsa
grounded the squadron. Stas passed one along without drinking when it came his way.

“More for me,” said the Russian to whom he handed it. The man’s larynx worked before he sent it along.

Stas cut thin coins of sausage and dropped them into a tin bowl of
shchi
. No, it wasn’t what he would have eaten back home. But Armenia was a little land. When you went out into the wider Soviet world, you found that Russians were an imperial nation even in such matters as what their non-Russian comrades ate.