Alternate Generals (16 page)

"Remember, soldiers of the Soviet Union, the motherland depends on your courage and discipline," Khrushchev added.

As Tolbukhin had planned, the perimeter force around the Nazi armory was as small as possible; the exploitation force, made up of teams from each army of the Fourth Ukrainian Front, as large. Tolbukhin went into the armory with the exploitation force. Its mission here was by far the most important for the strike against Zaporozhye.

Inside the armory, German efficiency came to the aid of the Soviet Union. The Nazis had arranged weapons and ammunition so their own troops could lay hold of whatever they needed as quickly as possible. The men of the Red Army happily seized rifles and submachine guns and the ammunition that went with each. They also laid hands on a couple of more MG-42's. If they could get those out of the city, the fascists would regret it whenever they tried driving down a road for a hundred kilometers around.

"When you're loaded up, get out!" Tolbukhin shouted. "Pretty soon, the Nazis will hit us with everything they've got." He did not disdain slinging a German rifle on his back and loading his pockets with clips of ammunition.

"We have routed them, Fedor Ivanovich," Khrushchev said. When Tolbukhin did not reply, the political commissar added, "A million rubles for your thoughts, Comrade General."

Before the war, the equivalent sum would have been a kopeck. Of course, before the war Tolbukhin would not have called the understrength regiment he led a front. Companies would not have been styled armies, nor sections divisions. "Inflation is everywhere," he murmured, and then spoke to Khrushchev: "Since you've come in, Nikita Sergeyevich, load up, and then we'll break away if we can, if the Germans let us."

Khrushchev affected an injured look. "Am I then only a beast of burden, Fedor Ivanovich?"

"We are all only beasts of burden in the building of true Communism," Tolbukhin replied, relishing the chance to get off one of those sententious bromides at the political commissar's expense. He went on, "I am not too proud to load myself like a beast of burden. Why should you be?"

Khrushchev flushed and glared furiously. In earlier days—in happier days, though Tolbukhin would not have thought so at the time—upbraiding a political commissar would sure have caused a denunciation to go winging its way up through the Party hierarchy, perhaps all the way to Stalin himself. So many good men had disappeared in the purges that turned the USSR upside down and inside out between 1936 and 1938: Tukhashevsky and Koniev, Yegorov and Blyukher, Zhukov and Uborevich, Gamarnik and Fedko. Was it any wonder the Red Army had fallen to pieces when the Nazis attacked in May 1941?

And now, in 1947, Khrushchev was as high-ranking a political commissar as remained among the living. To whom could he denounce Tolbukhin? No one, and he knew it. However furious he was, he started filling his pockets with magazines of Mauser and Schmeisser rounds.

Sometimes, Tolbukhin wondered why he persisted in the fight against the fascists when the system he served, even in its tattered remnants, was so onerous. The answer was not hard to find. For one thing, he understood the difference between bad and worse. And, for another, he'd been of general's rank when the Hitlerites invaded the motherland. If they caught him, they would liquidate him—their methods in the Soviet Union made even Stalin's seem mild by comparison. If he kept fighting, he might possibly—just possibly—succeed.

Khrushchev clanked when turning back to him. The tubby little political commissar was still glaring. "I am ready, Fedor Ivanovich," he said. "I hope you are satisfied."

"
Da
," Tolbukhin said. He hadn't been satisfied since Moscow and Leningrad fell, but Khrushchev couldn't do anything about that. Tolbukhin pulled from his pocket an officer's whistle and blew a long, furious blast. "Soldiers of the Red Army, we have achieved our objective!" he shouted in a great voice. "Now we complete the mission by making our departure!"

He was none too soon. Outside, the fascists were striking heavy blows against his perimeter teams. But the fresh men coming out of the armory gave the Soviets new strength and let them blast open a corridor to the east and escape.

Now it was every section—every division, in the grandiose language of what passed for the Red Army in the southern Ukraine these days—for itself. Inevitably, men fell as the units made their way out of Zaporozhye and onto the steppe. Tolbukhin's heart sobbed within him each time he saw a Soviet soldier go down. Recruits were so hard to come by these days. The booty he'd gained from this raid would help there, and would also help bring some of the bandit bands prowling the steppe under the operational control of the Red Army. With more men, with more guns, he'd be able to hurt the Nazis more the next time.

But if, before he got out of Zaporozhye, he lost all the men he had now . . .
What then, Comrade General?
he jeered at himself.

Bullets cracked around him, spattering off concrete and striking blue sparks when they ricocheted from metal. He lacked the time to be afraid. He had to keep moving, keep shouting orders, keep turning back and sending another burst of submachine-gun fire at the pursuing Hitlerites.

Then his booted feet thudded on dirt, not on asphalt or concrete any more. "Out of the city!" he cried exultantly.

And there, not far away, Khrushchev doggedly pounded along. He had grit, did the political commissar. "Scatter!" he called to the men within the sound of his voice. "Scatter and hide your booty in the secure places. Resume the
maskirovka
that keeps us all alive."

Without camouflage, the Red Army would long since have become extinct in this part of the USSR. As things were, Tolbukhin's raiders swam like fish through the water of the Soviet peasantry, as Mao's Red Chinese did in their long guerrilla struggle against the imperialists of Japan.

But Tolbukhin had little time to think about Mao, for the Germans were going fishing. Nazis on foot, Nazis in armored cars and personnel carriers, and even a couple of panzers came forth from Zaporozhye. At night, Tolbukhin feared the German foot soldiers more than the men in machines. Machines were easy to elude in the darkness. The infantry would be the ones who knew what they were doing.

Still, this was not the first raid Tolbukhin had led against the Germans, nor the tenth, nor the fiftieth, either. What he did not know about rear guards and ambushes wasn't worth knowing. His men stung the Germans again and again, stung them and then crept away. They understood the art of making many men seem few, few seem many. Little by little, they shook off pursuit.

Tolbukhin scrambled down into a
balka
with Khrushchev and half a dozen men from the Eighth Guards Army, then struggled up the other side of the dry wash. They started back toward Collective Farm 122, where, when they were not raiding, they labored for their Nazi masters as they had formerly labored for their Soviet masters.

"Wait," Tolbukhin called to them, his voice low but urgent. "I think we still have Germans on our tail. This is the best place I can think of to make them regret it."

"We serve the Soviet Union!" one of the soldiers said. They returned and took cover behind bushes and stones. So did Tolbukhin. He could not have told anyone how or why he believed the fascists remained in pursuit of this little band, but he did.
Instinct of the hunted
, he thought.

And the instinct did not fail him. Inside a quarter of an hour, men in coal-scuttle helmets began going down into the
balka
. One of them tripped, stumbled, and fell with a thud. "Those God-damned stinking Russian pigdogs," he growled in guttural German. "They'll pay for this. Screw me out of sack time, will they?"

"
Ja
, better we should screw their women than they should screw us out of sack time," another trooper said. "That Natasha in the soldiers' brothel, she's limber like she doesn't have any bones at all."

"Heinrich, Klaus,
shut up!
" another voice hissed. "You've got to play the game like those Red bastards are waiting for us on the far side of this miserable gully. You don't, your family gets a
Fallen for Führer and Fatherland
telegram one fine day." By the way the other two men fell silent, Tolbukhin concluded that fellow was a corporal or sergeant. From his hiding place, he kept an eye on the sensible Nazi.
I'll shoot you first
, he thought.

Grunting and cursing—but cursing in whispers now—the Germans started making their way up the side of the
balka
. Yes, there was the one who kept his mind on business. Kill enough of that kind and the rest grew less efficient. The Germans got rid of Soviet officers and commissars on the same brutal logic.

Closer, closer . . . A submachine gun spat a great number of bullets, but was hardly a weapon of finesse or accuracy. "Fire!" Tolbukhin shouted, and blazed away. The Nazi noncom tumbled down the steep side of the wash. Some of those bullets had surely bitten him. The rest of the German squad lasted only moments longer. One of the Hitlerites lay groaning till a Red Army man went down and cut his throat. Who could guess how long he might last otherwise? Too long, maybe.

"
Now
we go on home," Tolbukhin said.

They had practiced withdrawal from such raids many times before, and
maskirovka
came naturally to Soviet soldiers. They took an indirect route back to the collective farm, concealing their tracks as best they could. The Hitlerites sometimes hunted them with dogs. They knew how to deal with that, too. Whenever they came to rivulets running through the steppe, they trampled along in them for a couple of hundred meters, now going one way, now the other. A couple of them also had their canteens filled with fiery pepper-flavored vodka. They poured some on their trail every now and then; it drove the hounds frantic.

"Waste of good vodka," one of the soldiers grumbled.

"If it keeps us alive, it isn't wasted," Tolbukhin said. "If it keeps us alive, we can always get outside of more later."

"The Comrade General is right," Khrushchev said. Where he was often too familiar with Tolbukhin, he was too formal with the men.

This time, though, it turned out not to matter. One of the other soldiers gave the fellow who'd complained a shot in the ribs with his elbow. "
Da
, Volya, the Phantom is right," he said. "The Phantom's been right a lot of times, and he hasn't hardly been wrong yet. Let's give a cheer for the Phantom."

It was another soft cheer, because they weren't quite safe yet, but a cheer nonetheless: "
Urra
for the Phantom Tolbukhin!"

Maybe
, Tolbukhin thought as a grin stretched itself across his face,
maybe we'll lick the Hitlerites yet, in spite of everything
. He didn't know whether he believed that or not. He knew he'd keep trying. He trotted on. Collective Farm 122 wasn't far now.

The sun casts waves of shimmering heat over the Pennsylvania farmland, but he feels only cold. It is July. It might as well still be November. He tries to recall whether or not he was brought to the table for the Thanksgiving dinner, but he finds himself wandering through places in his mind where nothing dwells, not even light, where the walls of countless cells have been scrubbed slick and bare as hollow bones.

The question of Thanksgiving nags at him, senselessly, like an old dog that refuses to give up its tattered rag of a chew toy. Mamie isn't here to answer; perhaps she's gone to town, perhaps she's visiting the grandchildren, perhaps he's only lost in the false impression that she's gone at all when she's really still somewhere quite close, inside the house. He would ask her about Thanksgiving if he could, if he were only certain that one Thanksgiving is all that he's lost, if he could have some sense of self-assurance that his lips would respond to his desires well enough to form the proper words.

In the end, what does it matter, whether he can frame the stubborn question, whether he truly needs to have the answer? Even if he had the power to ask it, there is no one he can turn to for an answer. He is alone. The young male nurse who left him here, in this chair, within the safety of the glassed-in porch, is worse than absent. He brings too much with him when he tends the old man. He has yet to learn how to hold back the play of fear and pity over his face when he looks his patient in the eye.

The old man sees the nurse's thoughts as clearly as if they were set before him on his desk back in the White House:
You are our President and you are dying. Don't do it on my shift; don't leave the blame for your death with me
. And the old man also sees, as if it were a battle plan unrolled before him, the way his keeper's mind shifts the little metal figures on the mat, picking up the piece that is Eisenhower and tossing it away without a second thought, moving up to the front lines the piece that is Nixon.

Not yet, young man, not yet. I'm incapable of performing my duties as before, but is that all it takes to be cast aside? Helpless isn't dead
, he thinks behind the dull, expressionless sanctuary of his eyes.
I'm still in here, you know.
He wants to do something, raise a fist, a hand, no more than the tip of a finger, call up some short, sharp word to startle the nurse out of his comfortable assumptions about the old man's condition. But even if he could hold onto the little spark of will still raging bright within him, he lacks the power to direct it once held. It dances just beyond the reach of his fast-fading strength, defiant, elusive, indifferent to his history of command.

So he lets it go. Why bother to try ensnaring it, taming it, sending it here or there? The effort is too much for him to direct, much less maintain. Letting go is easier, he's found. Peace always follows surrender: Who should know that better than he, even if the surrender wasn't his until now?

Peace . . .

When the first stroke laid its cold finger across his brain, he was in his office, working on correspondence at his desk. There was to be a state dinner that night, and his mind was racing ahead to the preparations he would have to make for it as soon as he got all those papers before him cleared away. So much to do! So many places to be! So many questions demanding his immediate answer, all of them vital! How could one man manage it all without—?