The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (34 page)

“Oh,” Baatz said, his mouth a black circle of dismay. He tried to rally: “They can’t be worse than what we’ve been facing.”

“Oh, no? Since when?” Willi retorted. “You get in trouble here, maybe the Frenchies won’t plug you when you give up. What about the Russians? You want them to get their mitts on your carcass? They’d eat you up, I bet.”

Awful Arno was chunkier than most German soldiers. He was sensitive about the extra kilos he carried, too. His complexion went from dull red to fiery. “They don’t do things like that,” he said, but his voice lacked all conviction.

“They don’t fight fair. They’re Russians. They’re Bolsheviks. I don’t want ’em capturing me, by God,” Willi said.

Instead of arguing any more, Baatz changed the subject. That should have meant Willi had won. He supposed it did, but he still wasn’t happy about it, because Awful Arno said, “If we’re on the same side now, England and France’ll have to give back the German prisoners they took. If your asshole buddy Storch did run over there after all, he can tell the
Gestapo
all about it.” Now he sounded sure, all right, and full of gloating anticipation.

“Oh, give it a rest. I think that French bombardment blew him right off the map,” Willi said. As a matter of fact, he knew damn well Storch had gone to surrender to the French. The blackshirts would have grabbed him if he hadn’t. So would they get a second crack at him now? That seemed horribly unfair. Fair and unfair, though, had precious little to do with the price of beer.

Another
poilu
came up out of the French trenches. “Who wants to buy tobacco? Who wants to buy booze?” he shouted. Wherever he’d learned his German, he didn’t speak badly at all.

And he knew what the
Landsers
wanted, all right. Before long, field-gray and khaki mingled between the lines. Because of the favorable rate of exchange the occupation set, many Germans had more francs in their pockets than French soldiers did. Everybody went away from the deals happy.

Everybody, that is, except people like Arno Baatz. “It’s fraternizing
with the enemy,” he fumed. “There are regulations against things like that.”

“There’s a truce,” Willi said. “If they’re going to fight the Russians with us, they aren’t really the enemy any more, are they?”

“Don’t play barracks lawyer with me, Dernen,” Awful Arno snapped. “I’ll have that chickenshit pip off your sleeve so fast, you won’t know which way to look for it.”

“Zu befehl!”
Willi said.

“That’s more like it,” Baatz growled. Fortunately for Willi, he completely missed the irony in that
At your orders!

After a few days, the cease-fire began to seem more natural. Soldiers from both sides met and tried to talk with one another. They shared smokes and drinks. As best they could in each other’s languages, they swore at the officers who’d set them shooting at one another.

Willi had never particularly hated, or even disliked, France and England. His father came home from the last war with high respect for the
poilus
he’d fought. Even now, France seemed more … in the way than anything else. And the Tommies were as tough as anybody.

“Be funny, us fighting on same side,” said a French soldier who could muddle along in German. “Take orders from your generals. Funny, ja.” And he stumped around as he imagined a German general would walk.

To Willi, he looked like a self-important rooster. That wasn’t Willi’s take on his own generals, but it was funny. His French was much worse, so he stuck to German: “We’ll all clean out the Russians together.”

“Well …” A long pause from the
poilu
. “Maybe,” he said at last.

“What’s the matter?” Willi asked. “What else are we going to do? Why did you guys join up with us if that isn’t what you’ve got in mind?”

The
poilu
looked at him. “You don’t know me. You never find out who I am,
ja
?” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Willi.

“Sure, buddy.” Willi nodded anyway.

“You Germans, you do for your Communists.” The French soldier slashed a hand across his throat to show what he meant. Willi nodded again. The fellow in grimy khaki went on, “Us, we still have ’em. Not want to go fight against Russia.” He eyed Willi from under shaggy eyebrows. “Not want to fight for Hitler, neither. Fuck Hitler, they say.”

Had he been talking to Awful Arno, Baatz would have tried to deck
him, and maybe started the war up again. Willi only shrugged. “What can you do about it?” he asked, wondering if he’d hear something his officers needed to know about.

But the
poilu
shrugged, too, a gesture more expressive, less impassive, than Willi’s. “We all find out, ja?” he said.

CROSS THE SOVIET UNION
to fight Japan. Cross the country again, going the other way this time, to fight Poland and Germany and England and France and, for all Anastas Mouradian knew, Uruguay as well. He’d predicted that it would happen. Being right didn’t make him especially happy. On the contrary—it told him the people running the country had no more idea of what they ought to be doing than he did. The fate of the USSR didn’t pivot on his ideas. On theirs? That was a different story.

As far as he could tell, the Soviet government’s main business these days was bellowing defiance against the world. Whenever the Trans-Siberian Railway train (the
almost
Trans-Siberian Railway train, one wag put it) stopped to let passengers get out and stretch their legs, loudspeakers blared out promises of death and destruction to the Fascists and their reactionary capitalist running dogs. Posters, strident in red and black, showed angry clenched fists and determined workers in cloth caps carrying rifles.

It would have been impressive, had people paid more attention to the patriotic foofaraw. But the Soviet authorities had been yelling at the workers and peasants at the top of their lungs for the past generation. Who got excited about one more propaganda campaign?

The authorities seemed uneasily aware that they might have a problem. Mouradian’s train had almost reached the Urals when he saw new posters on walls and telegraph poles:
REPORT COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITY!
and
BEWARE WRECKERS!
Stalin and his henchmen suddenly seemed to realize some people might see the invaders from the West as liberators, not conquerors.

There was another Armenian on the train, a pilot named Hagop Balian. The two of them had enjoyed speaking their own language with each other. Mouradian was fluent in Russian, but that didn’t mean he
liked using it. Russian, for him, was like a car that wouldn’t engage its top gear. He could get around with it, but something was missing. Balian felt the same way.

No matter how they felt, they both went back to Russian as soon as they saw those security posters. Stas didn’t want ethnic Russians staring at him while he used a language they couldn’t understand. They might decide he was plotting against the Soviet Union, or even that he was speaking German. That would be good for a trip to the gulag archipelago, all right! And some ethnic Russians were more ignorant—and prouder of being ignorant—than anyone had any business being.

The propaganda campaign only got louder and more strident as the train neared Moscow. Some of the men on the platform at every stop belonged to the NKVD. They so obviously belonged to the security apparatus, they would have been funny if they couldn’t have ruined a man’s life with a single gesture. The arrogant stare, the aggressive, forward-thrusting posture … They should have come out of a bad movie, but here they were in real life.

“Your papers!” one of them barked at Mouradian when he got out to buy food.

“Here you are, Comrade.” He showed the man his military ID card and the orders that sent him to Moscow.

The Chekist looked them over, then grudgingly handed them back. “Well, be on your way,” he said, his voice gruff.

“Thank you, Comrade,” Mouradian said as he stashed away the precious documents. A soft answer turned away wrath … except, of course, when it didn’t. He bought a fatty sausage in a roll and got back on the train.

“All right?” Balian asked—again, in Russian.

“Well, sure,” Mouradian replied in the same tongue. They didn’t need to look at each other. There was a certain tone to which Russians seemed deaf. People from the Caucasus and Jews and other semitrusted associates of the largest clan in the USSR could use it to say what they wanted right under their masters’ noses.

Of course, the NKVD was full of people from the Caucasus and
Jews. The masters needed to have men who could hear that note around them, even if (no, especially since) they couldn’t do it themselves.

When they got to Moscow, they reported to a Red Air Force office in the shadow of the Kremlin. A bored lieutenant shuffled through papers till he found Mouradian’s dossier. “You served in the SB-2 in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, and against the Japanese,” he said.

Stas nodded. “That’s right.”

“And you were a pilot when you served in the Far East?”

“Yes, I was.”

“What do you think of the SB-2?”

There was a question Mouradian hadn’t expected. Cautiously, he answered with the exact truth: “It’s getting old for frontline action against modern fighters, but it can still do the job.”

The lieutenant grunted, which might have meant anything or nothing. He made a check mark on a form. Mouradian couldn’t read it upside down, so he worried. Had he come all this way to get purged because of an honest response? The man on the other side of the table looked up at him with eyes so pale, the irises were hardly darker than the whites—Russian eyes, eyes he never would have seen among his own people, dangerous eyes. “So,” the other fellow said, “you would prefer an aircraft with higher performance?”

If he said yes, was it off to the gulag for insulting what the Soviet Union already had? Dammit, he
did
want a plane like that, though. Still picking his words as carefully as he could, he said, “If such an aircraft is available, yes.” There were rumors that new bombers were in the works, but, so far as he knew, rumors didn’t yet translate into airframes.

Or did they? The other lieutenant checked a different box on that maddeningly upside-down form. “Very well,” he said. “You are assigned to pilot training on the new Pe-2 medium bomber. Go out the door you came in. Turn right. Go past two doors and into the third room on the left. They’ll take care of you there.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Stas said dazedly.

He went out. He walked down the hall. He went into the room to which the pale-eyed lieutenant had sent him. Several other Red Air Force officers sat in there. Most of them were smoking
papirosi
. A couple
sipped from glasses of tea. Stas went over to the samovar in the corner and got one for himself. It gave him something to do.

Another man walked in a couple of minutes later. “The Pe-2?” the new arrival said, as if he had trouble believing it. Only when the officers already in there nodded did he—and Mouradian—start to relax.

Hagop Balian came in, too. He looked as anxious as Anastas must have before. “It’s all right,” Stas said, and hoped he meant it. Even now, the NKVD could be lulling a room full of suspects.

Then a short, squat lieutenant colonel strode into the room. “You are men who have been chosen to fly the new Petlyakov bomber,” he declared. “Be proud, for you serve the Soviet Union in a new way. This machine makes the SB-2 look like it just got its dick knocked off.”

He was a Russian.
Mat
came naturally to him. Most of the pilots in the room were Russians, too. The sudden crudity only made them grin. Stas followed
mat
but hardly ever used it himself. You had to be a Russian to do it right.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” the lieutenant colonel said. “Come along with me, and you’ll see what’s what.”

They went. Trucks waited behind the building. Again, Stas wondered if they would head to a camp instead of an airstrip. He got into one anyhow. The only other choice was running, and he couldn’t do that … could he?

The trucks rattled out of town. His rear end knew when dirt replaced paving. He couldn’t see out except through the back. Most of what he saw was the snout of another truck right behind his.

After an hour and a half or so, the truck stopped. The senior officer had ridden up front with the driver, on a more comfortable seat. He jumped down and yelled, “Everybody out!”

Out Stas came. He smiled happily—it
was
an airstrip. The NKVD hadn’t nabbed him yet. Only after that thought was out of the way did he notice the planes there. They had to be Pe-2s—they sure weren’t anything he’d ever seen before. And … they made the SB-2 look like it just got its dick knocked off.

They were lean and long-nosed. They looked more like German Bf-110s than any other plane Stas could think of off the top of his head, and they weren’t much bigger. They’d be fast, the way the SB-2 had
seemed fast when it was new. And they’d pack a punch, too. All of a sudden, Stas wished he could do that pale-eyed lieutenant a favor, because the fellow had sure done one for him.

EVEN THOUGH SHANGHAI
lay under Japanese occupation, Hollywood movies still reached the theaters. Not right away, of course:
The Wizard of Oz
must have been out in the States for a year before it crossed the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. But here it was at last.

By himself or with his buddies from the Corps, Pete McGill would have chosen a Western or a gangster movie, or maybe a French flick with a bunch of chorus girls high-kicking in their scanties. Holding hands with Vera like a lovestruck teenager … the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion seemed a better bet.

He knew the story; he’d read the Oz books, and had them read to him, when he was a kid. Most Americans had. Vera hadn’t, so she didn’t. And she gasped when Kansas black-and-white turned to the Technicolor Land of Oz. Well, Pete almost gasped, too. That and the trick photography and the song-and-dance numbers were pretty amazing, even if it wasn’t a movie he would have chosen for himself.