Beside him in the warm, soft bed, Luisa sleepily said, “Gustav? What’s going on?”
“The Russians are coming.” His own voice sounded like the tolling of an iron bell. “You’d better get down to the cellar, dear.”
“What? They’re kilometers away from here. Even if those are guns, nothing’s going to happen here for a while.” His wife had woken up enough to think straight, anyhow.
Straight, maybe, but not straight enough. “The shells can’t get us yet, no,” Gustav answered. “And the Amis will fight hard to keep the Russians from breaking through here. This is one of the key places where they stand a chance of doing that. But the bombers should be here any minute.”
“Bombers?” Luisa started to scramble to her feet. “You don’t mean dropping one of those atomic things, do you?”
“No, or I don’t think so,” Gustav answered. “They want to go through Fulda, not make it so nobody can. But that doesn’t mean they won’t shoot up the place or drop regular explosives on it. So get moving!” He smacked her on the backside, hard enough to make her jump and yip. The noise sounded like a rifle crack-if you’d never heard a rifle crack.
For a wonder, Luisa didn’t argue with him. She just threw her hands in the air and hurried downstairs. Gustav put on dungarees, a sturdy wool shirt with lots of pockets, and the stoutest shoes he owned. They weren’t marching boots-no hobnails in the soles or anything-but they would have to do.
He started down the stairs himself. He hadn’t got to the ground floor before American antiaircraft guns started their percussive hammering. Through the quick-firing guns’ racket, he heard a rising roar of aircraft engines. Sure as the devil, the Russians were coming to town.
A split second later, he recognized which aircraft engines those were. They were Il-2s or, more likely, Il-10s: Shturmoviks. Just the sound made his balls want to crawl up into his belly. The attack planes’ Russian designers called them Flying Tanks. Fearful Landsers tagged them with names like the Meatgrinder and the Black Death. The Shturmovik was heavily armored and carried much too much forward-facing firepower. Though it wasn’t very maneuverable, all that steel plating made it a bitch and a half to shoot down.
Explosions rocked the outskirts of Fulda, marching closer and closer. Shturmoviks carried bombs, too. They’d zoom in just above the treetops or roofs, shoot and bomb everything in sight, and get the hell out.
Cannon rattled in the air. More bombs burst. The upstairs windows shattered. A noise like a car hitting a wall and a cloud of plaster dust pouring down the stairs after Gustav said a round from one of those airplanes had ventilated the bedroom.
“Go on!” he shouted at Luisa, who still hesitated near the top of the cellar stairs. “You want the next one to tear through you?”
“What are you going to do?” she asked-he showed no signs of taking shelter with her.
“Whatever the Americans let me. Whatever I can,” he answered with a shrug. “Remember, sweetheart, I know how to play this game. I had to quit in 1945, but it looks like things have started up again.”
“They’ll kill you!” Luisa said.
Gustav shrugged again. “If they do break through here, we’ll have to live under them. That’s not living. You don’t believe me, ask the Poles or the Czechs or the Hungarians. Ask the Germans in their zone. Now go on down there. Stay safe. I love you.” He hurried out the front door, not looking back to see whether she did what he told her to.
Out in the street, the air smelled of more plaster dust, of woodsmoke, and of high explosives. It also smelled of shit, and of the sour sweat of human fear. Gustav nodded to himself. It smelled like a battlefield, all right.
Another Shturmovik buzzed past, guns blazing. Gustav threw himself down behind a chimney that hadn’t been lying in the middle of the alley half an hour earlier. A bullet spanged off the bricks, struck sparks, and whined away. He laughed as he picked himself up again. Damned if his reflexes didn’t still work.
American jeeps and halftracks added the familiar note of exhaust fumes to the symphony of stinks. They were heading east, toward the fighting, not bugging out. That was good. Gustav supposed it was, anyhow. At least they meant what they said about keeping this part of Germany out of Soviet hands.
Gustav didn’t speak more than fragments of English. He’d picked up some Russian during the war-no, during the last war-but didn’t think that would do him any good. In fact, it seemed more likely to get him shot.
He went looking for Max Bachman. Max could palaver with the Amis for both of them. And he found his boss and friend sooner than he’d expected. The printer was heading toward his house.
“Here we go.” Max sounded surprisingly chipper. “Takes me back, it does, to hear the Iron Gustavs buzzing in.”
That was another German nickname for Shturmoviks. Gustav had got into a brawl about it when a Dummkopf in his section tried to pin it on him. From Max, he didn’t mind hearing it. And he felt surprisingly chipper himself. “Same here,” he agreed. “Come on. Let’s see if the Americans will give us guns for that militia thing.”
“Guns and uniforms.” Max wore the same kind of clothes Gustav did. “If the Russians catch us armed and we’re dressed like this-” He made a death-rattle noise. Of course, the Ivans might do in prisoners even in uniform. It was one of the things that happened. Gustav knew it had happened a good bit in the Wehrmacht. They played for keeps in the east. And what the Waffen-SS had done…
Battle brought new noises now. Jet fighters bansheed overhead. Some, with the American white star, went after the Shturmoviks. Others, with the Soviet red star, did their best to keep the Americans off the attack planes. The American and Russian jets tangled with one another, too. Gustav pumped a fist when a MiG fell out of the sky trailing smoke and with a big chunk of one wing bitten out. The crash had a dreadfully final sound. A plume of fire and greasy black smoke marked the fighter pilot’s pyre.
“Hey! You Yanks!” Max shouted to a couple of Americans going by in a jeep.
He made them stop, anyway. One of them said something to him. He answered in English. He sounded fluent to Gustav, but what did Gustav know? Max and the Ami went back and forth. Then the guy driving the jeep put it in gear and roared away.
“What did he say?” Gustav asked.
“They’re passing out rifles and jackets with armbands and helmets over by the Rathaus,” Max told him. “We have to promise to give the stuff back when the emergency’s over. They’ll use us, but they still don’t trust us very far.”
“I don’t care,” Gustav said. “No matter how bad the Americans are, Stalin will be worse.” Max nodded. They hurried over to the town hall.
Pom-pom guns in the square did their best to hold marauding Shturmoviks at bay. The rifles a grizzled American sergeant doled out were bolt-action Springfields, not the semiautomatic M-1s his countrymen carried. Gustav didn’t fuss. They were close cousins to the Mauser he’d lugged for so long. The jackets stank of mothballs. They’d probably been in storage somewhere since 1945. Again, so what? The band on the left sleeve read German Emergency Volunteer. Volkssturm men had worn such armbands the last time around. Sometimes they helped, sometimes not. The helmet was an American pot with a separate fiber liner, not a German coal-scuttle. Gustav didn’t think it covered enough of his noodle, but, like the rifle, it was better than nothing.
And he was soldiering again. All he needed was a tinfoil tube of liver paste to convince him he’d never been a civilian, not even for a minute.
–
“Walk!” the MGB man barked, the snap of accustomed command in his voice.
“Tak. I’m walking, Comrade, I’m walking.” Ihor Shevchenko took a calculated risk when he said yes in Ukrainian rather than using the Russian da. He spoke Russian fine. But he wanted the Chekist to think of him as a dim country bumpkin. And if he exaggerated his limp…Well, his mother hadn’t raised him to be a fool.