Bombs Away (49 page)

That applied to their own troops. It applied even more to soldiers from Hungary or Poland or Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria or Romania. If getting killed advanced the sacred cause of socialism, or if the Russian marshals even suspected it might, they spent troops like kopeks.

Foomp! Foomp!
Those were mortars going off. With the evil little beasts, the Hungarians didn't even have to stick their noses out of their holes to shoot back at the machine gun. Isztvan approved of shooting back without running the risk of getting hurt.

The machine gun fell silent. Isztvan wondered whether the mortar had killed the men who served it or they were bluffing and waiting to shoot down anybody naive enough to try to advance. Such questions were important. If you were a Hungarian soldier fighting in the Ruhr, they were life-and-death important.

In the lull, somebody from the other side shouted in Magyar: “What are you fools doing fighting for Stalin? Come over to the Americans! You'll be free, and no one will try to kill you or make you do anything you don't want to do!”

Hearing the man reminded Isztvan how many Magyars had left their own country for the United States in the days before the First World War. It reminded him all kinds of ways, in fact. The American soldier who spoke the language had plainly learned from his folks as a child, not in school. He had a peasant accent from the back of beyond, and an old-fashioned peasant accent at that. Magyar in Hungary had moved on, while his was stuck in the past like a fly in amber.

None of which had anything to do with the price of beer. He might talk like a clodhopper from 1895, but his message was modern as tomorrow. He wasn't saying anything Isztvan hadn't asked himself a hundred times. Isztvan didn't care a filler about the solidarity of workers and peasants all over the world. He was here because Stalin and Stalin's followers, both Russian and Hungarian, would have killed him or tortured him or jailed him had he tried to refuse. That was the long and short of it.

“Kibaszott szarházi!”
Those were Sergeant Gergely's dulcet tones. How did he know that the Magyar-speaking American was a fucking shithouse clown? Odds were he didn't, but that didn't stop him.

“God fuck your stinking, wrinkled whore of a mother!” the guy on the other side yelled back. Isztvan giggled. Maybe he hadn't learned
all
his Magyar from his mommy and daddy.

“Yell all you want, dog's dick,” Gergely said. “We didn't drop any A-bombs on your country.”

“No, Stalin did. You just suck him off,” the Hungarian-American replied.

Sergeant Gergely spoke to his own men: “You see how we're all friends together, right?”

Some of the Magyars answered to show him they agreed. Whether in fact they did or not was anybody's guess. Gergely had to know that. This was his second war fighting for a dubious cause. He had a different dubious cause now from the one he'd aided during World War II, but, as then, Hungary was doing what a great power required, not what it wanted to do itself.

Isztvan Szolovits kept his mouth shut. He didn't think protestations of loyalty would give the sergeant any more confidence in him. For that matter, he had no confidence in himself. If he found a chance to surrender to the Americans without getting killed, he figured he would jump at it. The Magyar-speaking Yank had that much right.

In the meantime, though, he needed to keep fighting. Chances to surrender didn't come along every day. The Americans would cheerfully kill him most of the time. The best way to stay alive and wait for the moment he might not find involved shooting back at them when they fired at him.

Which they did, with rifles, machine guns, and artillery. Under cover of all that flying metal, some of them started moving forward through the wreckage of whichever German city this turned out to be. They aimed to flank out the Hungarians and drive them back.

Isztvan was ready to retreat, if he could come out of his hole without getting killed. But half a dozen Soviet T-54s rumbled forward like dinosaurs squashing little mammals under their feet in some prehistoric swamp. Unlike those ancient little mammals, some of the Americans carried bazookas. But when two rockets in a row glanced off the tanks' turtle turrets without penetrating, the Yanks gave it up as a bad job and fell back to their old line.

An American who'd stopped a machine-gun bullet from one of the tanks with his face lay only fifty meters or so from Isztvan's hole. Greed overcame caution. He crawled to the dead Yank, took his food and cigarettes and first-aid kit, and slithered back to cover.

After dark fell, he gave Sergeant Gergely two of the three packs he'd looted. “Thanks, kid, but those Russian tankers deserve these more than I do,” the veteran said.

“Could be, but I know you and I don't know them,” Isztvan said. “Boy, that American who spoke Magyar sure talked funny, didn't he?”

“Oh, just a little,” Gergely answered. “Like he had cowshit on his boots and rode a donkey to church. I'll tell you something else, though—you think the Yanks won't fuck you over same as the krauts and the Ivans, you're nuts. They're big. You ain't. That's all it takes.”

“Could be,” Szolovits said again.

Gergely couldn't have seen the expression on his face. It was too dark. He chuckled anyhow, unpleasantly. “Don't do anything stupid—that's all I've got to tell you,” he said. Isztvan wished it weren't such good advice.

THE DOCTOR WHO EXAMINED
Konstantin Morozov's burned legs looked Jewish as Jewish could be: sallow skin, dark eyes, hooked nose. But she also filled out her white coat very nicely. “Sergeant, you look like you're fit to go back on duty,” she said. “Do you feel fit?”

His flesh remained tender—or, if you wanted to tell the whole story, sore. He nodded anyway. “Yes, Comrade Doctor,” he answered. He might have said no to a sawbones who shaved and won another day or two on this cot. Telling a woman no was harder. It felt like admitting he had a needle dick.

“All right.” She wrote something on the paper in the clipboard she carried. “The
rodina
needs every man who can fight.” He was going to say
I serve the Soviet Union!,
but she'd already moved on to the next iron cot.

They handed him a fresh set of tankman's coveralls and a new leather helmet with built-in earphones. They gave him just enough time to put his sergeant's shoulder boards on the coveralls. They they sent him over to the replacements' assignment depot.

“What was your last duty before you were wounded?” asked the military clerk in charge of the depot. He wore a patch over his right eye, so chances were he'd paid his dues during the Great Patriotic War. He could still do a job like this, and save a whole man for combat.

“Tank commander,” Morozov replied proudly.

“Ochen khorosho,”
the mutilated man said. “Have a seat on one of the benches. I don't think you'll need to wait long.”

Konstantin sat. The bench was too low. The building had been a school till war washed over it. Now half the roof had burned away. On one wall was a poster of a bulldozer clearing away rubble from the last war. Konstantin couldn't read the words. It wasn't his language, or even his alphabet. If he'd had to guess, though, he would have figured it said something like
We're getting back on our feet.

He scowled.
You're a bunch of fucking Fritzes,
he thought.
We flattened you once. Now we'll do it again.
After everything he'd seen in his own country during the last war, he wasn't about to waste sympathy on Germans.

“I'm just out of the aid station,” he said to the corporal next to him. “Can you give me a smoke?”

“Sure thing, Comrade Sergeant.” The other guy let him have a
papiros.
He smoked one himself, too. They started talking. The corporal's name was Igor Pechnikov. He added, “My father really did make brick stoves. How's that for a kick in the head?”

“Funny,” Konstantin said. Pechnikov was a son of a stovemaker both by surname and for real. Names built from trades and the trades themselves hardly ever matched these days, but they did with him. Morozov asked, “What do you do in the army?”

“I'm an RPG man,” the other guy answered. “A 155 took out most of my squad, so they're putting me in a new unit. How about you?”

“We probably shouldn't be friends. I'm in a tank, and you go around blowing them up,” Morozov said.

“Not ours. The enemy's,” the corporal said.

“I do understand that, yes.” Konstantin was about to say more, but the one-eyed clerk chose that moment to shout his name. He thumped Pechnikov on the shoulder, shouted “I serve the Soviet Union!”, and hurried over to the clerk's little table. His legs hurt more than he wished they did; he could have used those extra couple of days on his back.

A captain stood there. He eyed Morozov the way a hungry man would eye pork sausages in a butcher's shop. “A tank commander, are you?” he said.

“That's right, Comrade Captain,” Morozov replied.

“Are you fit?”

“Sir, they wouldn't have let me leave the aid station if I wasn't.” That was nonsense, and the captain had to know it as well as Konstantin did. Aid stations were for getting people back into the fight fast.

The officer didn't complain, though. He just said, “I'm Arkady Lapshin. Come along with me.”

Konstantin came. A jeep waited outside: Lend-Lease from the last war or captured in this one. The lance-corporal behind the wheel saluted Lapshin, nodded to Konstantin, and zoomed away as soon as they got in.

Sometimes he stayed on the road, sometimes not. The going was often better away from it. Much of the toughest fighting had been along the highways, and they showed it. The jeep went wherever the driver wanted it to. For a vehicle with tires, not tracks, it got around.

Artillery began to fire as they neared the front. Lapshin took it in stride. Morozov tried not to fidget, there on the jeep's hard back seat. He was used to armor between himself and shell fragments. These were Soviet shells going out, but American shells were liable to start coming in to answer them.

He thought the driver would take him into a tank park, the way they'd done things the last time he needed a new machine. But he'd had three crewmen out of four then. Now he was the sole survivor. If he hadn't been head and shoulders out of the T-54 when it got hit, he'd be as dead as the rest of them. Luck. All luck. Or God, if you could take God seriously.

No tank park this time. A tank under some fruit trees. Three men were working on the engine: a corporal, a lance-corporal, and a private. The jeep stopped. Lapshin hopped out. “This way,” he said, so Konstantin followed him.

The three soldiers—especially the corporal—eyed Morozov with what could only be disdain. He knew what that had to mean. Their old commander must have stopped one, maybe when he stood up in his cupola. The corporal had to be the gunner. He would have wanted command—and the promotion likely to go with it—for himself. How big a pain in the neck would he be now that he hadn't got them?

Captain Lapshin was, or affected to be, oblivious to the sour looks. “Here's your new commander, boys,” he said cheerfully. “Sergeant Morozov did it in the last war, too. He's just over a wound. Morozov, here's your crew: Juris Eigims, Gennady Kalyakin, and Vazgen Sarkisyan.” He introduced them in order of rank, and almost surely in the order gunner-driver-loader.

Great,
Morozov thought.
Only one other Slav.
Sarkisyan was squat and swarthy, with a beard he'd need to shave twice a day. He looked like the Armenian he was, in other words. Kalyakin had a Byelorussian accent. Eigims…Yes, Eigims would be trouble.

By his name, he was a Latvian, or maybe a Lithuanian. Either way, he would have been a kid when the USSR annexed his homeland. Some of the Balts were still pissy over that, not that they could do anything about it. Pissy or not, he'd have to shoot straight if he wanted to keep breathing. But how many other ways would he try to undercut his new superior? By the scowl on his blue-eyed face, as many as he could.

“What were you guys doing with the engine?” Morozov asked.

“Just trying to get it running smoother,” Eigims answered. His Russian held a musical lilt. He seemed fluent enough, which was good. Sarkisyan didn't talk much, but a loader didn't need a whole lot of Russian. As long as he got the difference between AP and HE, they'd do fine. A gunner, though, had to be able to talk and to understand.

“How's the fuel? How much water in it? How are the filters?” Konstantin asked the basic questions. Water in the fuel was worse than in a gasoline engine. And diesel fuel, being thicker than gasoline, carried more dirt and impurities along with it. With bad filters, crud could mess up your machinery in nothing flat.

“All seem all right. Check for yourself if you care to, Comrade Sergeant.” By the way Eigims said it, Konstantin realized they'd gummed up the engine on purpose somewhere. Where? That was for him to find.

And he did, too: clogged injectors on two of the engine's cylinders. He cleaned them out. “Fire it up now,” he said. “You should be able to hear a difference.” Juris Eigims kicked at the dirt. If he'd disliked Konstantin before, he hated him now.

As things went, Luisa Hozzel was lucky. The Russians who'd swept into Fulda hadn't raped her. They seemed to be behaving better than they had in the last war. The house had lost its windows, but it hadn't taken any direct shell hits. Now she had plywood or cardboard over all of them.

And she'd taken Gustav's Third
Reich
medals up into the attic and out of sight before any Red Army soldiers came in. Most of the men around here had served in the
Wehrmacht
or the
Waffen
-SS, and most of the ones who had served fought on the Eastern Front. The Russians hadn't dragged anybody out of his house and shot him in the town square for what he'd done then. A couple of men on the block had gone missing, though, and their families with them. Maybe they'd died in the first hours of the invasion. Maybe they'd fled. Luisa didn't believe it, though.

She stayed indoors as much as she could. Almost all the women in Fulda seemed to do that. The Russians might show better manners than they'd had before, but how far could you trust them? People still whispered horror stories about everything they'd done in eastern Germany.

She couldn't stay in all the time, though. She had to get food. Whenever she headed for the grocer's, she put on her oldest, frumpiest clothes. She messed up her hair so it looked more like a stork's nest than anything else. She scrubbed her face with harsh laundry soap. She did her best to look as if she were in her late forties, not her late twenties.

So far, it had worked. The Americans who'd held Fulda before had whistled and howled at her when she walked by. She'd always ignored them, which made them laugh. They went no further than laughing and whistling and howling, though. Plenty of other German girls didn't ignore them. If you were out for what you could get, you could get plenty from the Amis.

By contrast, the Russians now in Fulda ignored her. Or they had so far, though every time she left the house her heart jumped into her mouth till she got inside again.

Another trip today. She stuck a stringbag inside her purse, fortified herself with a knock of straight schnapps, and stepped out into the big, dangerous world. Sunlight, even the watery sunlight Fulda usually got, made her blink and squint. She didn't mind. With her face screwed up, she'd look older and homelier yet.

Fulda had changed since the Russians drove the Americans out. Part of that was battle damage; the Amis and the German emergency militia had fought hard to hold the town, but they'd got overwhelmed. (She had no idea what had happened to Gustav after he and Max and some others went off to play soldiers again. She prayed he was all right. She didn't know what else she could do.)

And part of it was the different flavor of propaganda she had to put up with. When Fulda was part of the U.S. occupation zone, posters had said things like
It goes forward with the Marshall plan!
It had seemed to go forward, too. Now…

Now she stared at Joseph Stalin and his bushy mustache—more impressive than Hitler's, she had to admit—everywhere she went.
For a free, socialist Germany!
the message under his portrait said. Other posters showed the Russian hammer and sickle and the East German hammer and compass side by side.
Together to victory!
that one shouted. Still others showed Russian tanks and soldiers going forward. They declared
The proletariat on the march is invincible!

Walls, fences, lampposts, telephone poles—they'd all got a thick layer of those posters. She hadn't yet seen a dog with one of them pasted to its side, but that had to be only a matter of time.

Three Russian soldiers came up the street toward her. They reeled instead of walking—they were drunk. Everything people said about how Russians poured it down seemed to be true. Luisa got out of their way and ducked into a shop that sold secondhand clothes. With Russians, as with her own people, drunks were dangerous. They didn't care about what they did, and they forgot rules they respected sober.

Ice ran up her back when one of the Ivans peered in after her. But then he staggered after his friends. She breathed again.