Winds of War (127 page)

“
Vy Amerikansky offitzer?
” The spotter showed fine teeth in the hairy uncovered patch of his face.

“
Da
.”

“
Posmotritye?
” The mittened hand tapped the binoculars.

“
Videte nemtzi?
” Pug said (“Can you see Germans?”)

“
Slishkom m’nogo
.” (“Too many.”)

“
Odin slishkom m’nogo
,” Pug said. (“One is too many!”)

With a grim nod and chuckle the spotter stepped away from the binoculars. Pug’s eyes were watering from the wind; he put them to the eyepieces and the Germans on the riverbank leaped into sight, blurry and small, still at the same work.

“Doesn’t it give you an eerie feeling?” Pam said, stroking the cat. “They’re so calm about it.”

Victor Henry went to a corner of the brick parapet and surveyed the snowy vista through all points of the compass, hands jammed in his blue coat. The spotter, turning the binoculars from south to north, made a slow sweep along the river, talking into a battered telephone on a long black wire that dangled over the parapet.

“Kitty, don’t forget behind the ears.” The cat was washing itself, and Pamela scratched its head.

Pug told her about his trip, meanwhile scanning the horizon round and round as though he were on a flying bridge. An odd movement in the distant snowy forest caught his notice. With his back to the spotter, he peered intently eastward, shielding his eyes with one chapped red hand. “Pass me those.” She handed him small field glasses, in an open case beside the binocular stand. One quick look, and Pug tapped the spotter’s shoulder and pointed. Swinging the large binoculars halfway round on the tripod, the spotter started with surprise, pulled off goggles and cap, and looked again. He had a lot of curly blond hair and freckles, and he was only eighteen or twenty. Snatching up the telephone, he jiggled the hook, talked, jiggled some more, and gestured anger at no answer. Pulling on his cap, he went trampling down the ladder.

“What is it?” Pamela said.

“Take a look.”

Pamela saw through the big eyepieces of the spotter’s instrument a column of machines coming out of the woods.

“Tanks?”

“Some are trucks and armored personnel cars. But yes, it’s a tank unit.” Victor Henry, glasses to his eyes, talked as though he were watching a parade.

“Aren’t they Russians?”

“No.”

“But that’s the direction we came from.”

“Yes.”

They looked each other in the eyes. Her red-cheeked face showed fear, but also a trace of nervous gaiety. “Then aren’t we in a pickle? Shouldn’t we get down out of here and find Amphiteatrov?”

To the naked eye the armored column was like a black worm on the broad white earth, five or six miles away. Pug stared eastward, thinking. The possibilities of this sudden turn were too disagreeable to be put into words. He felt a flash of anger at Tudsbury’s selfish dragging of his daughter into hazard. Of course, nobody had planned on being surprised in the rear by Germans; but there they were! If the worst came to the worst, he felt he could handle himself with German captors, though there might be ugly moments with soldiers before he could talk to an officer. But the Tudsburys were enemies.

“I’ll tell you, Pam,” he said, watching the worm pull clear of the forest and move sluggishly toward the town, leaving a black trail behind, “the colonel knows where we are now. Let’s stick here for a while.”

“All right. How in God’s name did the Germans get around back there?”

“Amphiteatrov said there was trouble to the south. They must have broken across the river and hooked through the woods. It’s not a large unit, it’s a probe.”

The top of the ladder danced and banged under a heavy tread. The blond youngster came up, seized a stadimeter, pointed it at the Germans, and slid a vernier back and forth. Hastily flattening out a small black and white grid map on one knee, he barked numbers into the telephone: “Five point six! One two four! R seven M twelve! That’s right! That’s right!” Animated and cheery now, he grinned at the visitors. “Our batteries are training on them. When they’re good and close, we’ll blow them to bits. So maybe you’ll see something yet.” He put on his goggles, changing back from a bright-eyed boy into a faceless grim spotter.

Victor Henry said, “They’re watching across the river for your batteries to fire.”

The spotter clumsily waved both heavy-clad arms. “Good, but we can’t let those bastards take the town from the rear, can we?”

“I hear airplanes.” Pug turned his glasses westward to the sky. “
Samalyutti!
”

“
Da!
” Swivelling and tilting the binoculars upward, the spotter began to shout into the phone.

“Airplanes too?” Pamela’s voice trembled. “Well, I’m more used to them.”

“That’s the German drill,” said Victor Henry. “Tanks and planes together.”

The oncoming planes, three Stukas, were growing bigger in Pug’s glasses. The spotter switched his binoculars to the tanks again, and began cheering. Pug looked in that direction. “Holy cow! Now I call this military observing, Pam.” Tanks in another column were coming out of the woods about halfway between the Germans and the town, moving on a course almost at right angles to the panzer track. He handed her the glasses and squinted toward the airplanes.

“Oh! Oh!” Pamela exclaimed. “Ours?”

“
Da!
” cried the spotter, grinning at her. “
Nashi! Nashi!
”

A hand struck her shoulder and knocked her to her hands and knees. “They’re starting their dive,” Victor Henry said. “Crawl up close to the dome and lie still.” He was on his knees beside her. His cap had fallen off and rolled away, and he brushed black hair from his eyes to watch the planes. They tilted over and dove. When they were not much higher than the belfry, bombs fell out of them. With a mingled engine roar and wind screech, they zoomed by. Pug could see the black crosses, the swastikas, the yellowish plexiglass cockpits. All around the church the bombs began exploding. The belfry shook. Flame, dirt, and smoke roared up beyond the parapet, but Pug remained clearheaded enough to note that the flying was ragged. The three ungainly black machines almost collided as they climbed and turned to dive again in a reckless tangle. The Luftwaffe had either lost most of its veteran pilots by now, he thought, or they were not flying on this sector of the front. Anti-aircraft guns were starting to pop and rattle in the town.

Pamela’s hand sought his. She was crouched behind him, against the dome.

“Just lie low, this will be over soon.” As Pug said this he saw one of the Stukas separating from the others and diving straight for the belfry. He shouted to the spotter, but the airplane noise, the chatter of A.A. guns, the clamor and cries from the town below, and the roar of the wind, quite drowned his voice. Tracers made a red dotted line to the belfry across the gray sky. The tin dome began to sing to rhythmically striking bullets. Victor Henry roughly pushed Pamela flat and threw himself on top of her. The plane stretched into a sizable black machine approaching through the air. Watching over his shoulder to the last, Victor Henry saw the pilot dimly behind his plexiglass, an unhelmeted young blond fellow with a toothy grin. He thought the youngster was going to crash into the dome, and as he winced, he felt something rip at his left shoulder. The airplane scream and roar and whiz mounted, went past, and diminished. The zinging and rattling of bullets stopped.

Pug stood, feeling his shoulder. His sleeve was torn open at the very top and the shoulder board was dangling, but there was no blood. The spotter was lying on the bricks beside the overturned binoculars. Bombs were exploding below; the other two planes were still whistling and roaring over the town; one plane was smoking badly. Blood was pooling under the spotter’s head, and with horror Pug perceived white broken bone of the skull showing through the torn shot-away cap, under blond hair and thick-moving red and gray ooze. Pug went to the spotter and cautiously moved his goggles. The blue eyes were open, fixed and empty. The head wound was catastrophic. Picking up the telephone, Pug jiggled the hook till somebody answered. He shouted in Russian, “I am the American visitor up here. You understand?”

He saw the smoking plane, which was trying to climb, burst into flames and fall. “
Da
! Where is Konstantin? The voice sounded exhilarated.

“Airplane killed him.”

“All right. Somebody else will come.”

Pamela had crawled beside the spotter and was looking at the dead face and smashed head. “Oh, my God, my God,” she sobbed, head in hand.

The two surviving planes were climbing out of sight. Smoke rose from fires in the town, smelling of burning hay. To the east, the two tank unit tracks had almost joined in a black V, miles long, across the plain. Pug righted the binoculars. Through smoke billowing in the line of vision, he saw the tanks milling in a wild little yellow-flashing vortex on the broad white plain. Five of the KV monsters bulged among lighter Russian tanks. Several German tanks were on fire and their crewmen were running here and there in the snow like ants. Some German tanks and trucks were heading back to the woods. Pug saw only one light Russian tank giving off black smoke. But even as he watched, a KV burst into violent, beautiful purple-orange flame, casting a vivid pool of color on the snow. Meantime the rest of the German tanks began turning away.

“Kitty! Oh, Christ, Christ, no, stop it!” Pam snatched up the cat, which was crouching over the dead man. She came to Pug, her tearstained face gaunt and stunned, holding the creature in her arms. Its nose and whiskers were bloody and its tongue flickered. “It’s not the animal’s fault,’ she choked.

“The Russians are winning out there,” Victor Henry said.

She was staring at him with blank shocked round eyes, clutching the black cat close to her. Her hand went to the rip at his shoulder. “Dearest, are you hurt?”

“No. Not at all. It went right on through.”

“Thank God! Thank God!”

The ladder jumped and rapped, and Colonel Amphiteatrov’s face, excited and red, showed at the top. “Well, you’re all right. Well, I’m glad. Many people killed. Quick! Both of you. Come along, please.” Then his eye fell on the body lying in blood. “
Agh!”

“We were strafed,” Pug said. “He’s dead.”

The colonel shook his head and sank out of sight saying, “Well, please, come quickly.”

“Go first, Pam.”

Pamela looked at the dead spotter lying on the bricks in snow and blood, and then at the tin dome, and out at the tank fight, and the black V gouged in the landscape. “It seems I’ve been up here for a week. I can’t get down the ladder with the cat. We mustn’t leave it here.”

“Give the cat to me.”

Tucking the animal inside his bridge coat, steadying it with one arm, Victor Henry awkwardly followed her down the ladder and the spiral stairs. Once the cat squirmed, bit, and scratched, and he almost fell. He turned the cat loose outside the church, but the clanking vehicles or the rolling smoke alarmed the animal and it ran back in and vanished among the wounded.

Through the open door of the black automobile Tudsbury waved his cane at them. “Hello! There’s a monstrous tank battle going on just outside the town! They say there’s at least a hundred tanks swirling around, an utter inferno, happening right this minute. Hello, you’ve torn your coat, do you know that?”

“Yes, I know.” Though drained of spirit, Victor Henry was able to smile at the gap between journalism and war, as he detached his shoulder board and dropped it in his pocket. The reality of the two small groups of tanks banging away out there on the snowy plain seemed so pale and small-scale compared to Tudsbury’s description.

“We had a view of it,” he said. Pamela got into the car and sank into a corner of the back seat, closing her eyes.

“Did you? Well, Pam ought to be a help on this story! I say, Pam, you’re all right, aren’t you?”

“I’m splendid, Talky, thank you,” Pam said, faintly but clearly.

Pug said to the colonel, “We saw the Germans starting to run.”

“Good. Well, Kaplan’s battalion got the word from down south. That is a good battalion.” Amphiteatrov slammed the car door. “Make yourselves comfortable please. We are going to drive straight back to Moscow now.”

“Oh no!” Tudsbury’s fat face wrinkled up like an infant’s. “I want to have a look when the fight’s over. I want to interview the tank crews.”

Amphiteatrov turned and faced them, and showed his gums and teeth without smiling. Behind him through the frosted windshield they could vaguely see on the main street of the town smoke, fire, a plunging horse, soldiers running, and green army trucks in a slow-moving jam. “Well, there has been a very big breakthrough in the north. Moscow is in danger. Well, all foreign missions will be evacuated to the Caucasus. We must skedaddle.” He brought out the awkward slang word humorlessly, and turned to the driver. “
Nu, skoro!
”

Under the blanket stretched across the passengers’ legs, Pamela Tudsbury’s gloved hand groped to Victor Henry’s hand. She pulled off her glove, twined her cold fingers in his, and pressed her face against the torn shoulder of his bridge coat. His chapped hand tightened on hers.

Chapter 56

Leslie Slote heard footfalls in the dark, as he sat in an overcoat and fur hat, working by the light of a kerosene lamp. His desk overflowing with papers and reports stood directly under the grand unlit chandelier in the marble-pillared great hall of Spaso House, the ambassador’s Moscow residence.

“Who’s there?” The nervous strident words reverberated in the empty halls. He recognized the white Navy cap, white scarf, and brass buttons, before he could make out the face. “Ye gods, Captain Henry, why didn’t they take you straight to the Kazan Station? Maybe you can still make it. You’ve got to get out of Moscow tonight!”

“I’ve been to the station. The train to Kuibyshev had left.” Pug brushed snow from his shoulders. “The air raid held us up outside the city.”

Slote looked at his wristwatch in great agitation. “But - that’s terrible! God knows when there’ll be another train to Kuibyshev - if ever. Don’t you know that one German armored column’s already passed by to the north and is cutting down behind the city? And they say another pincer is heading up from Kaluga. One doesn’t know what to believe any more, but it’s at least conceivable that in the next twenty-four hours we may be entirely surrounded. It begins to smell like Warsaw all over again. Slote gaily laughed. “Sorry there are no chairs, a party of mad Georgian workmen came in and covered and stacked all the furniture – oh, there’s a stool after all, do sit down –”