The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (16 page)

“Ja, ja,”
Adi said. Theo nodded. It was true enough. In a panzer regiment, company commanders and the regimental CO did lead machines of their own, and did advance with—sometimes ahead of—everybody else. They didn’t inflict their wisdom on the troops from kilometers behind the line, the way high-ranking officers had in the last war.

Well, Witt was a sergeant himself, and a panzer commander. Being a small-scale leader had to give him more sympathy for the worries of a large-scale one. Theo had no urge to tell anybody else what to do. He also had no desire whatsoever to have other people tell him what to do.

He wasn’t an ideal fit for the
Wehrmacht
, then. Ideal fit or not, here he was. He glanced over at Adalbert Stoss. Adi
wasn’t such a great fit, either. He might not mind giving other people orders, but he was even less thrilled about taking them than Theo. To Theo, other people were equals, and equals had no business telling other equals what to do. As far as Adi was concerned, other people were idiots until they proved otherwise.

He wouldn’t have deferred to Sergeant Witt if Witt hadn’t shown he knew what he
was doing. That was part of the trouble he’d had with the previous panzer commander. The rest of that trouble, though, had been more on the order of two rams banging heads in the springtime. Heinz Naumann wouldn’t do any more head-banging. He lay somewhere to the west, under a cross unless the Russians had desecrated his grave.

Woolgathering meant Theo’d missed some of the colonel’s harangue.
He wouldn’t lose any sleep over that. As he started paying attention again, Griehl was saying, “—will surround Smolensk in a ring of steel and fire. Along with our brave allies, we’ll smash the Russians inside that ring.”

He got some more applause. Theo marveled that he could talk like that with a straight face. The English and French were here, but didn’t want to be. The Poles were more enthusiastic,
but short of everything bigger than a machine gun. The less said about the Magyars and the Slovaks, the better. Anyway, they were farther south. Theo didn’t know what to think of the Romanians, but the way they’d gone belly-up in the last war didn’t make him figure Stalin’s teeth were chattering.

“I know you’ll serve the
Reich
well. I know you’ll serve the
Volk
well. And I know you’ll serve the
Führer
well.” Colonel Griehl’s arm shot up and out in the Party salute. “
Heil
Hitler
!
”

“
Heil
Hitler
!
” The panzer men echoed the shout and the salute. Since the failed
Putsch
against the
Führer
, it was supposed to have replaced the traditional military salute. And so it had—where anyone you didn’t trust could see you saluting. Theo muttered something wordless to himself. What was one more mask
among the many he already wore?

He scrambled up into his familiar place behind the Panzer II’s turret, away from the world and its cares—except, of course, when it started screaming at him through the radio earphones. The fighting compartment smelled of metal and leather and sweat and exhaust and smokeless powder. It smelled like home to Theo, even if home was thinly armored, too lightly armed,
and rapidly becoming obsolete.

From the turret, Witt said, “One of these days before too long, we’ll get ourselves a Panzer III instead.”

“God, I hope so!” Adi Stoss exclaimed as he started the engine. Theo wasn’t so sure he did. Yes, a Panzer III had thicker armor, a better cannon, and a bow machine gun to go with the one in the turret. But it also had a loader and a gunner in the turret along
with the commander (the radioman handled that bow gun). Was getting to know two new people scarier than attacking the Ivans in this old crate? To Theo, that seemed too close to call.

They didn’t have the new panzer yet. No matter what Sergeant Witt said, reports that they’d get one soon were only scuttlebutt. With a good crew—which this machine did have—a Panzer II could still do the job. Stoss
put the beast in gear. They not only could do the job, they damn well had to.

Witt rode with his head and shoulders out of the turret. Any panzer commander would do that when he wasn’t in combat. You could see a lot more that way; unlike the III and some French and English machines, the Panzer II had only a hatch, not a cupola. There was talk that new IIs would come with them, but that didn’t
do this one any good.

A good panzer commander would stay head-and-shoulders out of the machine even in action. The vision ports in the turret just weren’t an adequate substitute. Witt did. Heinz Naumann had, too. That was
how he’d stopped something. No one could fault Naumann’s guts: not even Adi, who’d hated them.

“There are some Frenchmen,” Adi said over the Maybach engine’s rattling growl
and the squeak and clank of the caterpillar treads. “They’re by the side of the road, trying to get their trucks going again.”

“Surprise!” Sour amusement filled Hermann Witt’s voice. Russian roads went from bad to worse. Road maps showed as paved were either rutted dirt tracks or, more often, not there at all. Theo didn’t know who’d made the maps. Some fool who believed Soviet propaganda, probably.
He did know that Western European soft-skinned vehicles made to run on asphalt or concrete fell to pieces trying to deal with Russian potholes and mud and engine-abrading dust. German trucks broke down as fast as their French and English counterparts.

In spite of his earphones, Theo started hearing gunfire. The Ivans knew when things could get rolling. They did what they could to stop their foes
from pushing deeper into Russia. Witt ducked into the turret, but only to grab his Schmeisser. Then he popped up again like a jack-in-the-box.

“Infantry reporting enemy panzers in the woods ahead,” someone said on the radio. Theo relayed the message to Sergeant Witt.

“Oh, they are, are they?” Now Witt sounded almost gay. “Well, that’s what we’re here for, right?” Theo didn’t answer. He had no
idea why he was here. He only knew he was, and that he wanted to go on being here. Philosophy in the back of a panzer? Witt would never understand.

Then half a dozen people started screeching in Theo’s earphones at the same time. “Oh, my God!” Hermann Witt exclaimed, while Adi Stoss yelled, “What a fucking monster!” One of the people on the radio said something about the biggest panzer he’d ever
seen, so Theo decided it wasn’t King Kong coming out of the woods after all.

Which didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. Witt fired several 20mm rounds at the Russian machine. He slapped in another ten-round clip and fired some more.

“They just bounce off!” he said in horror. Beauty wouldn’t kill the Red beast, and maybe nothing else would, either. Witt came out with something even more horrified—and
horrifying: “Dodge like hell, Adi! He’s aiming at us!”

Adi did his best to comply. Russian panzer gunners were often lousy, especially against moving targets. Often, but not always.
Wham! Clanng!
The hit almost threw Theo out of his seat. The round didn’t get through into the fighting compartment, but the Panzer II slewed sideways and stopped.

“Out! Out fast!” Adi shouted. “He knocked a track
off! If he hits us again—”

He didn’t go on, or need to. Theo grabbed his Schmeisser and bailed out. The other two panzer crewmen left through his hatch, which exposed them to less enemy fire than their own. They huddled in the lee of the disabled panzer.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like a deshelled snail,” Adi said.

Theo nodded. He did, too. He peered around the damaged Panzer
II. He wanted a glimpse of the machine that did the dirty work. It
was
a monster. It seemed twice the size of the light German panzer, and mounted a gun that looked like a piece of field artillery. The cannon belched flame.
Wham! Clanng!
Another Panzer II exploded into fire. That crew had no prayer of getting away. Theo shuddered. Roasting inside your shell was even worse than coming out of it.

“MOSCOW SPEAKING.”
By the self-important way the words came out of the radio, the whole city might have been talking through the speaker, not just an announcer holed up in a studio somewhere. Or so it seemed to Anastas Mouradian, anyhow. He didn’t share the conceit with his fellow flyers. They already thought he was strange. He didn’t want to give them any more reasons.

“Red Army forces have
struck more and more heavy blows against the Fascist and reactionary invaders west and south of Smolensk,” the newsreader went on. “The enemy’s tanks continue to show themselves unable to face in the field the latest products of Soviet engineering.”

Radio Moscow gave forth with great steaming piles of propaganda. Anyone with an ear to hear—which Mouradian certainly owned—knew that. Here, though,
as best he could tell, the announcer meant every word. The new heavy tanks named for General Kliment Voroshilov
were bigger and tougher than anything the Nazis or their friends built. Facing Panzer IIs—even Panzer IIIs—a KV-1 was like a bear against a pack of yapping dogs. But the KV-1s came in ever-growing packs, too.

“Farther south,” the radio newsman went on, “the soldiers of the glorious
Red Army are being welcomed as liberators in Bessarabia, which the Romanians stole while reactionary forces attempted to strangle the infant Soviet Union in its cradle.”

That sounded impressive. Mouradian wasn’t old enough to remember much about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He remembered that Armenia had been independent for a little while, and then part of a bigger Trans-Caucasian
Soviet Socialist Republic. Then, after the Whites and their foreign allies were beaten, Moscow reasserted its authority over the region. No, he didn’t remember all the political details. What he mostly remembered was going hungry all the time.

Anyone who’d lived through the Revolution had memories like that. If you were a Ukrainian, you had several sets of them, and you were probably lucky to
be alive. Rumors said lots of Ukrainians welcomed German and Polish soldiers the way the radio reported the Bessarabians were welcoming the Red Army. The louder and more stridently Radio Moscow denied those rumors, the more Stas believed them.

“Unrest in England against the government’s unnatural alliance with the Hitlerite barbarians continues to grow,” the newsreader said. “Police have been
uncommonly brutal in suppressing demonstrations against Prime Minister Wilson.”

He went on to talk about ever-swelling Soviet war production. Plan after plan was overfulfilled, quota after quota exceeded. Stas wondered if he was the only flyer listening who thought about what would happen if people demonstrated against Stalin in Red Square. The NKVD, which was commonly brutal, would be uncommonly
so for something like that. Would captured protesters be killed out of hand or sent to the gulags so they had more time to think about what reckless fools they’d been? An interesting question. Either way, the poor devils wouldn’t like the answer.

There was war news in the Pacific, too. Mouradian couldn’t make
much of it, not least because the announcer kept stumbling over unfamiliar place names.
He gathered that Japan was advancing and everyone else falling back. Having served for a while in the Far East, Mouradian knew only too well that the Japanese were no bargain. Now the rest of the world was discovering the same thing.

Germany and her friends were no bargain, either. Japan could annoy and gnaw at the Soviet Union, and had done exactly that. But thousands of kilometers separated
her from the USSR’s vitals. If Hitler paraded through Moscow in a Mercedes, could Stalin keep up the fight from Sverdlovsk or Kuibishev or some other town on the far side of the Urals? Mouradian had his doubts. He suspected Stalin did, too.

Which meant the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would move heaven and earth to keep the Nazis out of Moscow and as far from the
USSR’s capital as he could. It also meant Mouradian moved through the heavens toward Mogilev, which had recently fallen to the invaders. Along with him in the Pe-2 moved a thousand kilos’ worth of bombs. Stalin wouldn’t care that a stubborn Armenian was flying. The explosives, though, the explosives would matter to the director of the Soviet state.

The squadron’s target was the railroad yard.
Maybe withdrawing Soviet troops hadn’t torn it up well enough. Maybe enemy railroad men had got it back in operation faster than the Russians figured they could. Keeping trains from going through Mogilev would help defend Smolensk, and Smolensk was Moscow’s most important shield.

Fires and plumes of greasy black smoke from burning tanks marked the front between Mogilev and Smolensk. Not all the
burning armor came out of enemy factories. Soviet light tanks were still depressingly easy to kill. And even the KV-1s could go up in flames. Maybe some German Panzer III got lucky, or maybe the foe had a field gun in a good place.

In the Pe-2’s cockpit, Ivan Kulkaanen turned to Mouradian and said, “The stinking Fascists aren’t having it all their own way, anyhow.”

“No, they aren’t,” Stas agreed.
Yes, that was true. But he would have felt obliged to agree even if the Nazis were driving the Red Army back headlong. Disagreeing with something like that would have been defeatism.
England might tolerate such disagreement in wartime—or, if the morning news held any truth, might not. The Soviet Union never had and never would.

A few antiaircraft shells burst near the formation of Pe-2s. Stas
didn’t see any planes catch fire or go down. That was good news. They flew on. Once they got past the front, things quieted down. It often worked out that way. If the Germans didn’t also have plenty of antiaircraft guns in and around Mogilev, though, Stas would be happily surprised.

After a while, he didn’t just hear the engines’ drone. It became a part of him, so that his toenails, his muscles,
his spine, and his spleen all vibrated to the same rhythm. The oxygen-enriched air tasted of rubber and leather.

Kulkaanen pointed through the armor-glass windshield. A city lay ahead. Unless the squadron had really buggered up its navigation, that had to be Mogilev. They’d dive to make the attack more accurate. Pe-2s weren’t Stukas; they didn’t stand on their noses to deliver ordnance. (They
could also fly rings around the clumsy German bombers.) But they did have dive brakes, and used them on attack runs.