The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (38 page)

The text was in English, of course. Vaclav knew even less English than Spanish—he could get beer and some food in Spanish now, and was starting to be able to swear when he didn’t get them fast enough to suit him. But there wasn’t a whole lot of text, anyway. The pictures carried the
action, and pictures were a universal language. For what he couldn’t get from them, Chaim made an enthusiastic translator and explainer.

“See, Metropolis is pretty much like New York City,” the American Jew said. “Not exactly, but pretty much. I’m from New York City, so I should know, right?”

“New York City is like
that
?” Vaclav pointed to one of the panels. Superman was rescuing a scantily
clad girl with one hand and picking up an enormous locomotive in the other. The bad guys’ Tommy-gun bullets ricocheted off his chest as if he were armored like a tank.

“Well, not exactly.” Chaim sounded a little embarrassed. “But the look of the place—the skyscrapers and the cars and the clothes and all—that’s pretty close. And the newspaper office where Superman works when he’s being Clark Kent,
that looks like a newspaper office. I mean, it’s bigger and cleaner than a real one—I’ve been in ’em, so I know—but it’s got the idea right, anyway.”

Vaclav had been in a newspaper office in Prague. It was tiny and airless and dark, housed in some building left over from the eighteenth century. It smelled of ink and beer and tobacco and unwashed people. How it turned out a newspaper every day,
God only knew; the editor plainly had no idea. Next to that, even a rougher version of what the comic book showed seemed very much like heaven.

“America must be a strange place,” Vaclav said.

“Man, you got no idea,” Chaim answered.

“If you lived there, why did you come here?”

“For freedom. For adventure. For love.” The Jew’s face twisted. “And I got ’em all, and they ain’t worth shit. Women
are crazy, you know? You can’t live with ’em and you sure as hell can’t live without ’em.”

Not much originality there, but great feeling. Carefully, Vaclav said, “You aren’t the first guy who ever found this out.”

“I guess not, but that don’t make it hurt any less,” Chaim replied, and Vaclav found himself without a comeback for that.

WILLI DERNEN SEWED
his pip onto a patch with a chevron, then
sewed the chevron onto the left sleeve of his uniform tunic. Not just a
Gefreiter
—an
Obergefreiter
. The promotion gods had smiled on him again, presumably because he’d stayed lucky enough not to stop anything. He was a very senior private indeed.

He found it obvious that, if and when a bullet finally found Arno Baatz, he could step right up and do Awful Arno’s job better than Arno did himself.
Corporal Baatz, unsurprisingly, held a different opinion. “You think you’re such hot shit, don’t you?” Baatz said. “Well, puff and blow all you want. They won’t make you an
Unteroffizier
if you live to be a million.”

Blow me, Arno
, Willi thought. Aloud, he said, “How about that?” It was a pretty safe phrase any old time.

“Well, they won’t, dammit,” Awful Arno insisted. “You have to go to noncoms’
school to learn to do all the stuff an
Unteroffizier
has to do. It takes weeks. You’d never hack it—no way in hell.”

As far as Willi was concerned, if Awful Arno had made it through noncoms’ training school, anything this side of Hans the counting horse could probably do the same. Telling him as much was a great temptation. Regretfully, Willi held back. Life was too short … he supposed.

So all
he said was, “I notice you’re wearing your shoulder straps upside down so the Ivans don’t spot the pips on them.”

“I should hope I am,” Baatz said importantly. “Most noncoms do, you know. The Reds understand that we’re what makes the army tick. They’d sooner shoot a corporal than a private any old day.”

Willi had never dreamt he would sympathize with the Red Army, but all of a sudden he did.
Again, letting Baatz know everything on his
mind struck him as less than a good idea. He hoped he sounded patient as he answered, “I understand that. But my pip’s on my sleeve, where I can’t hide it. And the chevron only makes it stand out more.”

“Shall I cry for you?” Awful Arno said, and Willi sympathized with the Russian sharpshooters more than ever. Luckily not understanding that, Baatz went
on, “Anyway, you’ve only got it on one side. From the right, the Russians will just figure you’re an ordinary, miserable, no-account private.”

“Wunderbar,”
Willi said. At least Baatz hadn’t added
instead of an ordinary, miserable, no-account
Obergefreiter. He was probably thinking it, though, the same way Willi was having unexpected kind thoughts about the Ivans.

No matter what he thought about
them, they didn’t love the
Wehrmacht
. Several batteries of 105s opened up on the German positions southwest of Smolensk. Willi and Corporal Baatz both dove for a foxhole. It was big enough to hold the two of them, though Willi would have bet Baatz was no happier about being cheek-to-cheek with him than he was smelling Awful Arno’s stale sweat.

If a shell came down on top of them, they’d both
head for the Pearly Gates at the same instant. Willi looked forward to passing through while demons with pointy pitchforks dragged the
Unteroffizier
down to a warmer place. He would cherish the look on Baatz’s face, damned if he wouldn’t. That was an un-Christian thought; he knew as much. Knowing and caring were two different beasts.

Somebody a couple of hundred meters away shrieked for an aid
man. That sobered Willi. No, he didn’t want a 105 round to come down on them after all, not when he had no guarantee of dying instantly. He’d seen too many slow, anguish-filled ways of passing to want to experiment. Baatz’s cheese-pale face said he wasn’t thrilled about what was going on, either.

“Damn Russians have too many guns,” Baatz yelled through the din.

“Too right they do!” Willi agreed
with great feeling.

And then things got worse. He hadn’t dreamt they could.
Something
screamed down out of the sky, trailing a tail of fire. No, not one
something
, but dozens of them spread through a square kilometer or so, all screaming the way Willi’d imagined Arno Baatz’s damned soul doing.
And then, over no more than a few seconds, they all slammed into the ground and they all exploded.

“Gott im Himmel!”
Willi shouted, as loud as he could. He hadn’t a prayer of hearing himself. Awful Arno’s lips were moving, too, but Willi couldn’t hear him, either. He had trouble breathing, and tasted blood when he coughed to try to clear his ears. He suspected he was lucky—if he
was
lucky—the blast hadn’t finished him altogether.

He looked around. The Russian rockets—he supposed they couldn’t
be anything else—had left the ground a smoking moonscape. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay scattered at random across it. And the German soldiers who survived were panicking like a bunch of Dutchmen suddenly up against panzers.

Mouths wide open to let out cries of terror Willi couldn’t hear,
Landsers
raced toward the rear. Some still carried their rifles or machine guns. Others had thrown them
away so they could run faster—or else just forgotten all about them. Here and there, officers and
Feldwebels
tried to stem the tide. They had as much luck as King Canute.

Willi might not have heard those frightened yells, but even his battered ears caught the rising screams in the air to the northeast. “Oh, no! Not again!” he wailed, and curled up in a ball like a pillbug.

The second rocket
salvo caught too many panicked Germans out in the open. Between shattering blasts and scything shards, a man standing up without shelter didn’t have a chance. Side by side with Willi, Arno Baatz also tried to squeeze himself into as small a space as he could. Willi could read his lips as he howled, “Make it stop, Jesus! Make it stop!”

Jesus, unfortunately, wasn’t in charge of that. The Soviet
high command was. The rockets didn’t come again. But a wave of Red Army foot soldiers surged out of their trenches and swarmed toward the battered German line. Willi supposed they were yelling
“Urra!”
—they always did when they charged. He sure as hell couldn’t hear them, though.

If they got close enough, they would kill him. No matter how blast-stunned he was, he could see that. His fine new
sniper’s Mauser found its way to his shoulder without his quite realizing how it got there. He could hear the report, and the kick helped bring him back to himself. An Ivan fell over. Willi swung the rifle a little to the left. He potted another Russian.

Arno Baatz uncoiled and started shooting, too. So did other
Landsers
here and there. The rockets hadn’t taken out or terrorized everybody. But
that khaki Russian wave kept coming. There weren’t enough Germans left to stop it, and wouldn’t have been even if the discombobulated ones were still able to fight.

Willi could see that. Could Awful Arno, or would he get sticky? Mouthing exaggeratedly, Willi shouted, “We’ve got to get out of here!”

“What?” Baatz mouthed back. Willi repeated himself. The corporal’s eyes showed white all around
the iris. Baatz bit his lip. Then he nodded.

They both scrambled out of the foxhole and staggered toward the rear—toward a place where, God willing, things like this didn’t happen. They weren’t the only ones, either. Something in Willi’s chest loosened when he saw Adam Pfaff. He first recognized his buddy by his rifle’s gray paint job. Pfaff himself was too filthy to put a name to. Willi guessed
he was no cleaner himself.

Pfaff waved. A Russian bullet cracked past, between him and Willi. They both ducked. Pfaff said something. Willi held a cupped hand to his ear to show he couldn’t hear. Pfaff mimed shock, horror, and disbelief. Then he turned and fired a couple of shots to slow down the oncoming Ivans. That struck Willi as a brilliant idea. He did the same thing himself. Corporal Baatz
also sent a round their way. Arno might be awful, but he did have balls.

Then a chattering machine gun really slowed the Russians. Cannon shells burst among them, too. Panzers to the rescue—and Willi hadn’t even realized they were around till they started firing. He wondered if his hearing would ever come back. Or had the rockets scrambled it for good?

Right this minute, he didn’t care. It looked
as if he might get out of here pretty much in one piece. Next to that, nothing else mattered.

IVAN KUCHKOV HAD NEVER
gone to the Ukraine before. Now that he was here, he wouldn’t have minded getting the devil out. The locals talked funny. A lot of them were anti-Soviet, and hardly bothered to hide it. They seemed to be waiting for the Nazis to run the Red Army out of their neighborhood. As far
as Kuchkov was concerned, they could all go …

For once, he and the
politruk
were on the same side. “Show traitors no mercy!” Lieutenant Vasiliev said furiously. “Think what they’ll do to you if they get half a chance. And don’t give it to them!”

The men listening to the political officer nodded. By their wide eyes, some seemed not to have had any such notions on their own. Were they really so
wet behind the ears? Kuchkov feared they were. Milk-fed, too damn many of them. If you didn’t learn to watch out for yourself, you could bet somebody would jump on you. With both feet, too. In hobnailed boots.

And Vasiliev added, “One thing you don’t need to worry about. The victory of the glorious Soviet Union over the debased and degenerate jackals who nibble at her is certain. Certain, I tell
you!”

Was it? As far as Kuchkov was concerned, the only certain thing was that, sooner or later, somebody would screw you. Or sooner
and
later, more likely. And, if victory was so bloody certain, why had his division been shipped south to try to slow down the Nazis here? And how come all the fighting these days was on Soviet soil? Shouldn’t things be moving the other way?

“Questions?” the
politruk
added.

One of the reasons he asked was to see what kind of questions he got, and from whom. Kuchkov kept his right arm down by his side. What kind of idiot were you if you gave them extra rope to hang you with? They could build a case against you out of nothing if they wanted to. It was a million times worse if they really had something. The Germans would kill you. But so would the people you
were supposed to be fighting for.

That had to be why so many Ukrainians were ready to raise a hand in the Nazi salute. Ivan Kuchkov grunted to himself. Well, at least now it made sense. He knew he still had to plug the worthless bastards without hesitation if he thought they had anything to do with the
Feldgrau
boys.

There were Romanians in the neighborhood, too, but he didn’t worry about them.
The Poles farther north hadn’t had as much fancy equipment as the Germans, but they meant it when they fought you, and that counted for more. Marshal Antonescu’s swarthy soldiers? Nah. The only reason they were here was that they’d get it in the neck if they
tried to bail out. You did have to be careful not to mistake them for your own guys, because they wore khaki, too. But their uniforms had
a different cut, and they used funny helmets, easy to recognize since they were so long fore and aft.

The Germans were the trouble, though, and the Ukrainians, and his own superiors.
Fuck it
, he thought.
Nobody’s done for me yet
.

He and half a platoon of soldiers cautiously entered a village the next day, not long after sunup. The peasants stared at them with expressionless faces. Ivan didn’t
quite point his submachine gun at a guy with a cloth cap and a big, bushy white mustache. “How you doing, Grandpa?” he said. “Seen any Fritzes around here?”

Grandpa came back with a paragraph of Ukrainian. For all the good it did Kuchkov, it might as well have been Portuguese. He glanced at his own men to see if any of them made sense of it. Some Russian dialects were closer than his to the crap
they spoke down here. A private said, “I
think
he says there haven’t been any around.”