The War That Came Early: West and East (62 page)

Searchlights darted and probed. Antiaircraft tracers and bursts were beautiful, but they didn’t make Joaquin think of celebrations, the way they usually did. He knew too well that this was war, and all the bright lights intended nothing but death.

A searchlight speared a three-engined bomber—an Italian plane—in its glare. Antiaircraft fire from half a dozen guns converged on the machine the gunners could see. The bomber twisted and jinked, writhing like a stepped-on bug. The searchlight hung on to it. Others also found the bomber. Fire licked along its right wing. It tumbled toward the ground.

Bombs whistled down. Not all the sirens that screamed belonged to the warning system. Some came from ambulances and fire engines. Joaquin wondered if he should jump into a trench. The POWs had dug them to try to stay alive through air raids. But the show in the sky held a horrid fascination. He didn’t want to miss any of it.

He could have been smarter. He could have done a better job of gauging the screams of falling bombs. One went off close enough to knock him ass over teakettle. Fragments shouted and screamed past him. Once bitten, twice shy—he stayed flat as a run-over toad.

He did, anyhow, till he saw prisoners joyously running out through a big hole blasted in the wire. Then he scrambled to his feet and ran with them. No guards shouted warnings or opened fire. Had they been blown to hell? Or were they just cowering in their own foxholes, the way any men with a gram of sense would? Joaquin didn’t care. As soon as he got out into Madrid in these overalls, he’d look like anybody else. And, thanks to Chaim Weinberg, he knew how to sound like a Republican, too. They’d never catch him once he got loose. Then he could …

What?
he wondered. What could he do? Something. Anything! As long as he was doing it for himself, who cared? If somebody needed him to haul sacks of shit, he’d do that. He’d like it, too. He’d never been afraid of work. Nobody who grew up on a Spanish farm could possibly be afraid of work.

Another bomb whistled down. Joaquin flattened out again. This one was going to be even closer. Maybe he should have waited before he

Chapter 26

S
now. Wind. Cold. Gloom. Sergei Yaroslavsky took them for granted in wintertime. He could think of very few Russians who didn’t—the lucky handful who lived on the Crimean coast, perhaps. The bad weather was settling in earlier than usual, but even ordinary winters were long and hard.

By contrast, Anastas Mouradian gave forth with a melodramatic shiver.
“Bozhemoi
, this weather’s beastly,” he said in his accented Russian. He swigged from a bottle of vodka and passed it to Sergei. Nobody would fly today: not the Red Air Force, not the Poles, not the
Luftwaffe
. Nobody. By all the signs, nobody would get off the ground any time soon, either.

“It’s winter, Stas,” Sergei answered. “You got out of Armenia a while ago now. You know what winters are like once you come north.”

“Like hell. Like Dante’s hell in the
Inferno,”
Mouradian said. “He put Satan in ice, not in fire.”

“Either one would work, if I believed in God or Satan or hell.” Mouradian tacked on the coda to keep the other officers sitting around there getting drunk because there was nothing more interesting to do from
thinking him a believer. He wasn’t, or not much of one. Believing in God and worshiping weren’t illegal, but they wouldn’t do your career any good.

Another bottle came by. Sergei swigged, then passed it on to Mouradian. The Armenian said, “What do you suppose the other ranks are doing now?”

Overhearing that, Colonel Borisov laughed raucously. Everybody’d put away a good deal by then. “Those motherfuckers? They’re already under the table—you can bet your balls on it. When they settle in with the popskull, they don’t dick around,” the squadron commander said.

Maybe he’d poured down enough vodka to leave his tongue loose at both ends. Or maybe he was just using
mat
to tell the truth as he saw it. Either way, Yaroslavsky thought he was bound to be right. “I hope Sergeant Kuchkov doesn’t get into a brawl,” Sergei said. The liquor was making him fussily precise instead of careless and sloppy.

Even Mouradian smiled at the way he spoke. “The Chimp will do whatever he does,” he said. “He proves Darwin was right—if we still have ape-men among us, we must have come from them a long time ago.”

Kuchkov’s reputation had spread through the whole squadron. “Better not let him hear you talk like that,” a pilot warned. “He’d tear your head off and piss in the hole. He’d be sorry afterwards, but—”

“So would I,” Mouradian broke in, and got a laugh.

“You bet you would be,” the other officer said. “Wouldn’t do you a kopek’s worth of good, though.”

One more drunken truth. “He’s still a good man to have in the bomb bay,” Sergei said.

“Sure he is,” the other fellow agreed. “He’s got more muscles in his cock than most guys have in their leg.” That was an exaggeration. Sergei thought so, anyhow.

Colonel Borisov looked at his wristwatch. That made several other people, Sergei among them, do the same thing. It was three or four minutes before the top of the hour. Borisov stood up. A moment later, he involuntarily sat down again. Swearing, he tried again. He swayed this time, but stayed on his feet. Proud as a sozzled peacock, he shuffled over to the radio set and turned it on.

The tubes needed half a minute or so to warm up. When sound started coming out of the set, a children’s chorus was singing of the glories of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Listening, Sergei suddenly understood how a fly had to feel while it was drowning in a saucer of sugar syrup. His face showed none of that. Even drunk, he had no trouble hiding what he thought. Few Soviet citizens had that kind of trouble; most of the surviving ones who did were in a gulag these days.

Mercifully, the chorus ended. An announcer spent a minute urging his listeners to buy war bonds. “Work like Stakhanovites, save like Stakhanovites!” he boomed. Then he too shut up and went away. Sergei wondered how many exhortations like that he’d heard. Thousands. It had to be thousands. And the radio was a new invention, too. He remembered the first time he’d ever listened to one. He’d been sure it was magic. What else could it be?

“Moscow speaking,” a familiar voice said. You could set your watch by the hourly news bulletins. Sergei had, plenty of times. If he tried it now, he’d make a hash of it. Enough antifreeze coursed through his veins to make that a certainty.

“Moscow speaking,” the newsreader repeated. “Fierce fighting continues east of Warsaw. Fascist claims to have driven the heroes of the Red Army back in headlong retreat are, of course, nothing but the usual lies that spew like vomit from the Hitlerite and Smigly-Ridz regimes. Advances by the forces of progress, however, have proved less rapid than our beloved General Secretary, Comrade Stalin, would have preferred. Changes in the command structure of Red Army units fighting in Poland are expected to improve matters in short order.”

Someone whistled softly. Sergei didn’t see who it was, but he shared the sentiment. How many generals who hadn’t advanced fast enough to suit Stalin were advancing on Siberia right this minute? How many had died of 9mm heart failure? When you shot a man in the back of the head, his heart
did
stop beating. “Heart failure” made for a nice, neat death certificate.

“English, French, and Norwegian forces continue to retreat in Norway,” the newsreader continued. “We must resign ourselves to the fact
that the capitalist and imperialist forces cannot be relied upon to check the Nazis, and that another country is vanishing down the Hitlerite maw. If Norway falls, it will bring the German cannibals dangerously close to the Soviet Union’s northwestern border—only a thin slice of Finnish territory separates Norway from the USSR. And Finland, under the reactionary rule of Marshal Mannerheim, cannot be relied upon the remain neutral.”

What did that mean? Was Stalin thinking about taking Finland himself before the Nazis could? If he was, would he get away with it? The Soviet Union had had a tougher time in Poland than anyone expected. How tough were the Finns? Sergei had no idea, and wasn’t eager to gain a firsthand education on the subject.

“In the Far East, fighting continues against the Japanese imperialists,” the newsman said, and not another word on that score. The bald announcement could mean only one thing: the fighting wasn’t going well for the Soviet Union.

Sergei had wondered if the squadron would be detached from the fighting in Poland and sent across the USSR to bomb the Japanese invaders. Since it hadn’t happened yet, he doubted it would for a while: not till spring, at the earliest. Days of decent flying weather were so scarce in this season, it might be faster to disassemble the SB-2s and ship them and their crews by train, then put the machines back together again.

The trouble with that was, the planes couldn’t go far enough by rail. Barring a miracle, Vladivostok would fall. And Marxist-Leninist doctrine had no room for miracles.
Too bad
, Sergei thought. The Motherland could really use one over there.

“On another front, Japan’s intolerable aggression and oppression have reaped what the historical dialectic would predict,” the newsreader continued. “Chinese guerrilla strikes against the brutal enemy continue in Shanghai, Peking, and other centers occupied by the invaders. Anything that damages Japan on one front cannot help but damage her on all fronts.”

He was right … Sergei supposed. He also sounded like someone whistling in the dark to try to show he wasn’t afraid. If Japan were fighting
the United States in the Pacific, that might draw off enough energy to weaken her against the USSR. Chinese guerrillas weren’t a big enough cause to create the same effect.

But the United States remained neutral. If Japan beat the USSR, that would be all right with the Americans. And if the Soviet Union finally beat Japan, that would be all right, too. Why not? Either way, each country would hurt the other badly, and the USA would end up facing a weakened foe.

The newsreader started bragging about aluminum production, hydroelectric plants, and kilometers of copper wire. Sergei stopped listening. Industrial output was important, but he couldn’t do anything about it. The vodka bottle came round once more. He damn well could do something about that. He could, and he did. The bottle felt noticeably lighter when he passed it again. Outside, the wind raved on.

CHRISTMAS WAS COMING AGAIN
. Peggy Druce hadn’t expected to spend one holiday season away from Herb, let alone two. She couldn’t do anything about that. Before this latest trip to Europe, she’d always thought she was too important, or at least too clever, for anything bad to happen to her.

She knew better now. When the world went to hell around you, you discovered you weren’t fireproof after all, no matter what you’d thought before.
Well, I’m doing asbestos I can
, she thought, and smiled and flinched at the same time. Herb would make that kind of horrible pun at any excuse or none.

Making it here wouldn’t do her any good. A lot of Swedes, maybe even most of them, knew some English. But they wouldn’t get the wordplay—which might be just as well.

Still, this was better than the joyless Christmas and New Year’s she’d spent in Berlin the year before. The lights were on—no blackouts in Sweden. Food wasn’t rationed. People here wore better clothes, and they went around looking happier than the Germans had. Why not? Sweden wasn’t in the war. She wouldn’t be, either, unless the Nazis dragged her in.

The Swedes were ready to fight if Germany tried it. You saw plenty of
men in uniform in Stockholm. Sweden had stronger industries than either Denmark or Norway. She bought planes and tanks from other countries, but also built her own. She made her own artillery, too. Peggy didn’t suppose Sweden could actually lick Germany, but she’d let Hitler know he’d been in a fight.

Didn’t he already have enough on his plate? He seemed likely to win in Norway, and Germany and Poland were doing all right against Russia. Peggy was sure Hitler would happily fight Stalin to the last drop of Polish blood.

But things weren’t going so well for the Nazi supermen in the west. And that was the key front … wasn’t it? When the war first broke out, she would have been certain it was (with the exception that the German attack on Marianske Lazne almost killed her, and what could be more important than that?). She wasn’t so sure any more. One way or another, the Russians would have their say. Peggy was no Red—Herb would have bopped her over the head with something had she leaned that way—but she could look at a map and make sense of what she saw. There was an awful lot of Russia, and there were an awful lot of Russians. Sooner or later, that had to count … unless, of course, it didn’t.

Only one way to tell: wait and see. Peggy had just reached that brilliant conclusion when a knock on the door to her hotel room chased it out of her head. She opened the door without the least hesitation: certainly with less than she would have shown in a hotel back in the States. Stockholm wasn’t the kind of place where a burglar was likely to cosh you and make off with whatever he could carry.