Bombs Away (28 page)

He didn't even know that. He was a new fish, all right. “Best bitter,” Daisy said patiently.

“You got that right!” He grinned and nodded. “It is the best—you better believe it!” He slid another fat silver coin at Daisy. “Big old coin,” he remarked, eyeing it. “Bigger than a cartwheel.”

“Cartwheel?” Whatever that Americanism meant, Daisy hadn't run into it before, at least not where it had to do with money.

“Silver dollar,” the Yank explained. “They haven't made 'em since the Depression—they just make halves, and use dollar bills instead.”

“Notes, we say.”

“Do you? How about that? Anyway, though, I'm from California, and there's still lots of silver dollars around out West.”

She took one more stab at not gypping him: “Let me give you your change, please.”

He shook his head. “Nah, don't bother. Way things look, I'm not likely to live long enough to care what I've got in my pockets when I go down.”

What has he got in his pocketses?
Memories of some children's book flickered in Daisy's mind. Where did that line come from? As the Yank had, she also shook her head. The title wouldn't come back to her. Letting it go, she said, “Well, your next couple are on the house, then.”

He touched the patent-leather brim of his officer's cap. “Much obliged, dear, but you don't have to do that.”

“I'm not doing it because I have to. I'm doing it because I want to,” Daisy said, in lieu of something like
You've already bought them anyhow, you silly twit.
He wouldn't have paid any attention to that unless it made him mad.

“Well, that's mighty nice of you.” He touched his cap again, coming closer to a real salute this time. “What's your name?”

“I'm Daisy Baxter. I run the Owl and Unicorn.”

“Mighty pleased to meet you, Daisy. My name's Bruce—Bruce McNulty.” He eyed her. “You run this joint? For real?”

“That's right.” She nodded. “Why?”

“I just figured they hired you to tend bar on account of you're so pretty—they figured you'd draw guys the way sugar draws ants.”

She chuckled. She'd heard more lines than she could remember; that was better than most. As was her habit, she replied as if he hadn't been strewing compliments around: “No, the pub's mine. It's been mine since a little before the war—the last war, I should say—ended. My husband was fighting in Germany, and he didn't come home.”

“Oh. I'm mighty sorry to hear it. I was there myself—I was flying a B-25 then. Just dumb luck I came back in one piece. The krauts, they sure did their best to see that I didn't.”

She would have guessed him for a year or two younger than she was. Probably not, though, not if he'd fought in World War II. “What do you fly now?” she asked him.

“One of the Superforts down the road,” he said, which surprised her not at all. “Guys who were in the B-25 and B-26 kind of have a head start on the big bird, since they all come with nose wheels. A little harder when you're used to tilting up because you were in a B-17 or some other plane with a tailwheel.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” she said, which was true enough.

Bruce McNulty wagged his hand, as if to say it didn't matter one way or the other. “Enough about me,” he said, so earnestly that she could tell the best bitter was doing some of the talking. “What I want to know is how come a pretty gal like you never found another fella.”

Daisy would have retired rich long since if she'd had a quid for every lecherous flyboy who asked her that. For
another fella,
they always meant
me.
Now she shrugged. “At first, I wasn't at all interested, which I'm sure you'll understand. Since the worst of the grief passed away, I haven't met anyone who suited me.”

She waited for this McNulty to volunteer his services. That was what they did. Except he didn't. He just said, “Well, I hope you do one of these days.” Such restraint so amazed her, she drew him another pint on the house. Why not? She was still far ahead of the game.

Gustav Hozzel didn't know exactly where he was. Somewhere between Frankenberg and Arnsberg—he knew that much. Along with the Amis—and with Max Bachman, who also remained lucky—he was still retreating to the north and west. And the Red Army was still coming on. Not much seemed to have changed from the last war, in other words.

He was filthy. He couldn't remember the last time he'd bathed. He couldn't remember the last time he'd shaved, either. His beard had streaks of gray on the chin that hadn't been there the last time he went to war. But he wasn't lousy, which he surely would have been then. A couple of weeks earlier, an American aid man had sprayed him with DDT. He had no idea what went into DDT. Whatever it was, it did to lice and fleas and ticks and other little pests what Zyklon-B had done to Jews.

Russian mortar bombs whispered in and blew up with sudden, startling bangs. After one of those bangs, someone started shrieking for his mother—in English, so he was an American. You felt bad when somebody screamed liked that. No human being who wasn't desperately hurt could make such horrible noises. Gustav would have felt a trifle worse had the wounded man been a fellow German.

Then he blinked and whipped his head around. That noise like a giant tearing heavy canvas was a blast from the past in the most literal sense of the words. That couldn't be anything but a German MG42—no other machine gun in the world had such a high rate of fire. Whoever was shooting it had found enough 7.92mm cartridges to satisfy its appetite for ammo.

Some of the Russians knew what it was. They cried out in alarm. They'd hated and feared the MG42 from the moment the Germans started using it. It spat death at rates unmatched. Because of that and because of the noise it made, they called it
Hitler's saw.
The Amis and the Tommies hadn't loved it, either.

Most Russian private soldiers, like their American counterparts in this fight, would be too young to have heard it before. The old sweats, the corporals and sergeants and officers from captain's rank on up, would have to warn the kids what they were facing.

I bet the Amis are glad it's not shooting at them this time,
Gustav thought. He crawled toward the snarling gun. That noise brought back happy memories to him, memories of Russian soldiers falling over and Russian soldiers running away.

He wanted to find the crew that had brought such an excellent weapon out of retirement. If they needed him to help serve the gun, he would gladly do that. He could handle it. By the end of the war, each German squad had centered on an MG42 (or, occasionally, an older, more finicky, MG34). The riflemen were there more to protect the machine gun than for the sake of their puny firepower. Everybody learned to handle the piece in case the regular guys got hurt.

Gustav looked for a detachment of emergency militiamen, figuring only Germans could properly appreciate the wonders of the MG42. But the men serving the machine gun—and doing it with the same unflustered competence
Landsers
would have shown in the western Ukraine in 1944—were Yankees, jabbering away in English.

Gustav hadn't worried about English during the Second World War. He'd picked up tiny bits in the years since. Because Fulda lay so close to the border with the Russian zone, it had swarmed with American soldiers. The Amis had run the town till they finally let it elect its own
Burgomeister.
Gustav and Max had printed for them, in English as well as German. So he had those bits. Max, now, Max could really use it.

He waited for the crew to notice him, and to make sure he wasn't a Russian but wore pretty much the same uniform they did. Then he pointed at the MG42 and asked, “Where find?”

As soon as they figured out he was one of the gun's original users, they burst out laughing. One of them spoke better German than Gustav did English. “We found it in a warehouse,” he said, his speech painfully correct, like a clever schoolboy's. “We found some friends who knew where cases of cartridges were kept. It uses a great many cartridges.”

“You've sure as hell got that right,” Gustav said. Then he said it again, more slowly. The Ami didn't understand what he heard very well. He must have studied German in school and forgotten it till he came over here.

“It's a wonderful gun, though,” another American said, in English. He added “
Wunderbar!
” in case Gustav hadn't got it.

But Gustav nodded—he had. “Do you change the barrel often?” he asked the fellow who had a little
Deutsch.
Because the MG42 put so many rounds through the barrel so fast, it heated up in a hurry. The
Wehrmacht
had issued an asbestos mitt to handle the hot metal. With it, you could take off the old barrel and swap in a new, cool one in seconds.

The Americans didn't have an asbestos mitt. Stowing those along with the machine gun would have stretched even German efficiency. But they did have a folded-up wool blanket that now showed scorch marks. The Ami showed it to Gustav to let him know they weren't burning out the barrels. He nodded again. People said Americans were good at improvising.

Russians, on the other hand…Russians were good at muddling through, at keeping at it when anyone sane would have given up.
“Urra! Urra!”
the infantrymen shouted, a sound to make the hair of anyone who'd heard it before want to stand on end. They were nerving themselves for a charge.

“Urra! Urra!”
Here they came, a great khaki flood of them.

For a bad fraction of a second, Gustav thought he was back in the other war, trying to hold a position in Poland or, later, in eastern Germany. Then the flashback, the nightmare, merged with reality, and reality was just as bad. Armed with the Russian PPSh, he had to sit tight as the Ivans rushed forward. Some of them still wore billowing greatcoats; it might be spring, but it wasn't warm. His submachine gun was just a peashooter—it couldn't reach them yet.

Some of them tripped in holes in the ground or over hastily laid barbed wire. A few stepped on land mines. One must have set off a big charge, because he and two of his neighbors vanished into scarlet mist. But the rest of the Red Army men closed ranks, linked arms, and came on. They were as impervious to doubt or damage as they had been on the
Ostfront
a few years before. Vodka and fear of their own secret police both had to play a part in that.

Rrrriiiippp! Rrrriiiippp!
The MG42 cut loose. The Amis fired short bursts to keep from overheating the barrel as best they could. They traversed it so the stream of bullets knocked down Russians across a broad stretch of the line. Riflemen and Yankees with grease guns—which fired heavier cartridges than the PPSh—also took a toll. That khaki wave was liable to roll over these defenses anyhow.

An American took another belt of ammo out of a wooden crate and fed it into the MG42's insatiable maw. The old crate had an eagle with a swastika in its claws burned onto its side. That emblem was illegal in the new Germany the Allies had made and then broken. It was mighty welcome to Gustav just the same.

Bullets snapped past the machine gunners. Some of the Ivans were shooting as they ran. It wasn't aimed fire, or anything like it. With enough bullets flying, that didn't matter. Gustav started shooting back from behind a large chunk of broken brickwork. The Ivans were close enough for him to have a decent chance of hitting them with the PPSh—not a good sign.

Then another machine gun opened up. Its bass stutter put even the MG42's growl to shame. During the last war, Gustav hadn't had to face the Americans' .50-caliber machine gun. He counted himself goddamn lucky he wasn't facing it now. Those big, heavy slugs didn't just drop the Russians they hit in their tracks. They threw the poor, sorry bastards every which way, like crumpled wastepaper.

Flesh and blood, even vodka-numbed flesh and blood, had their limits. Between them, the MG42 and that heavy monster not only reached but exceeded those limits. Instead of rushing forward, the Russians still on their feet turned and ran away. They wouldn't break through on this stretch of the line.

One of the Americans on the MG42 tossed Gustav a pack of Camels.
“Danke,”
Gustav said. His hands trembled when he stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He needed three tries before he could light it. The Amis didn't laugh at him. They were having the same trouble themselves. They'd lived through a nasty firefight. The shakes came with the territory.

Tibor Nagy had a bandage on his right thigh, under his dirty trousers. He had another one on his ribs. Both wounds were just grazes. They'd bled. They'd hurt. They'd left him with horrendous bruises, too. Try as he would, he couldn't find a comfortable way to sleep.

People kept telling him he was lucky. If they meant he was lucky not to be dead, they were right. As far as he was concerned, though, real luck would have involved not getting hit at all or getting wounded badly enough to have to leave the front without getting crippled.

Instead, he crouched in a muddy hole in the ground. Artillery fire burst not nearly far enough away. Shell fragments screeched and whined by overhead. Pretty soon, the Russians would tell the Hungarian People's Army to attack the Americans again.

No matter what the Russians told him, Tibor didn't want to fight Americans. He didn't want to fight anybody, but he really didn't want to fight Americans. If you were on a schoolyard playground, did you poke the biggest kid in the eye, especially when he came from the richest family in town? Not unless you were out of your mind, you didn't.

Or unless the mean kid at school told you he'd wallop the snot out of you unless you took a poke at the big, rich kid. That was what had happened to everybody in the Hungarian People's Army. No matter what its soldiers thought, Stalin didn't give them much choice. As a matter of fact, he gave them none.