It wasn’t a great speech. Stalin seldom made great speeches. But it did show he was alive. Gribkov was amazed how good that made him feel. He’d been a baby when the Revolution came. He didn’t remember anyone else at the Soviet Union’s helm. He couldn’t imagine how the immense country would go on without its leader.
Boats took the bomber crewmen from the Stalin to the edge of the pack ice. Dog sleds took them across the ice to Korf itself. The hamlet-it might have held a thousand people, or it might not-sat on a sand spit. People clumped over the snow on skis and snowshoes.
They gave the men from the Tu-4 as much of a heroes’ welcome as they could. The toasts they drank, they drank with samogon, but it was good samogon. The roast they served was enormous, tasty, and, best of all, on dry land. However tasty it was, it didn’t seem familiar. “What kind of meat is this?” Gribkov asked.
“Bear,” answered a flat-faced local. “I shot it myself.” The pilot had got hungry enough aboard the Stalin that the news hardly slowed him down.
Korf had a rudimentary airstrip. Rudimentary airplanes buzzed down to take away the Tu-4’s men. Boris eyed the Po-2s in delight. “I learned to fly on one of those!” he exclaimed.
“Me, too,” Vladimir Zorin said. “I can’t imagine a Soviet pilot who didn’t.”
These particular wood-and-canvas biplanes sported skis for landing gear. Snow didn’t faze the Kukuruznik, either. As if he were still a student, Gribkov climbed into the front seat.
The pilot revved the little radial engine. The plane taxied along till it sedately rose into the sky. Icy wind in his face, Gribkov grinned like Christmas. This was what flying was supposed to be!
12
Gustav Hozzel sprawled in the ruins of the suburbs west of Alsfeld, forty kilometers northwest of Fulda. He’d never visited Alsfeld in all the time he’d lived in Fulda. He didn’t want to be here now, but the Russians had barged through the Fulda gap and were doing their best to overrun all of Western-occupied Germany, plus anything else they could get their grabby mitts on.
The Americans were fighting. Gustav had to give them that much. They’d battled the Ivans street by street, house by house, inside Alsfeld. That was why Gustav could still lie here on the outskirts of town. The Amis had smashed a lot of Russian tanks. They’d kept snipers in the cathedral bell tower till Russian artillery leveled it. Those guys had to know they would die if they went up there. They did it anyhow. They were soldiers, in other words.
Even if they were soldiers, Gustav still hated their helmet. It didn’t cover enough of a man’s head. A few German auxiliaries had put on the Wehrmacht’s Stahlhelm instead. But the Russians didn’t take prisoners from men who did that. They killed them in cold blood, and left them on display with swastika placards by the bodies. Gustav got the message, and kept his Yankee pot.
He didn’t care for the egg grenades on his belt, either. You could throw a German potato-masher farther. He had nothing against the Springfield the Amis had issued him. It was as good a rifle as a Mauser. But now he carried a PPSh he’d taken off a dead Russian. Close-range firepower was what he wanted, and the submachine gun gave it to him.
He really craved a Russian assault rifle. Some Landsers on the Eastern Front had carried weapons like that as the war drew toward its end, but never enough to hold back the Russian tide. Keeping the PPSh in ammo was easy: it fired ordinary pistol cartridges. The assault rifle used a special round, halfway between pistol and rifle. Feeding it might prove a chore if he got his hands on one.
In front of him and off to the left, a machine gun opened up. That was a Russian piece; he knew the sound as well as he knew Luisa’s heartbeat when he laid his head on her left breast. He hoped his wife was all right. He could only hope right now.
More submachine guns went off. American M-1s answered, a rhythm halfway between a bolt-action rifle and an automatic. They could hit somebody with a PPSh or a PPD before he got close enough to hit them. But if the guy with the submachine gun did get that close, he had the edge.
Very cautiously, Gustav looked out from behind the burnt-out carcass of the Mercedes that gave him cover. The Mercedes sat a good many centimeters lower than it had before fire swept over it. The tires were gone, so it rested on the metal wheels. Whatever color the expensive car had been, it was charcoal-gray now.
Not seeing anything dangerous coming his way, he pulled back. “How’s it look where you’re at, Max?” he called.
His friend and comrade lay behind an overturned steel file cabinet. The Mercedes probably gave better cover, but that wasn’t bad. “I’m smoking a cigarette,” Bachman said. “I think I have time to finish it.”
“Sounds about right,” Gustav said, and then, after a moment, “You know, it’s funny that all this doesn’t seem funny. We’re used to it. We know what to do, and we know how to do it, too.”
“Ja, ja.” Max sounded exaggeratedly patient. And he had his reasons: “Wait till they start throwing atom bombs around here. See if you know what to do then.”
“Of course I know what to do then. I fucking die, nicht wahr?” Gustav said. They both let out black chuckles. The Americans weren’t using atom bombs because this was the part of Germany they wanted to protect, not to wreck. The Russians hadn’t used them yet because…well, who the hell knew why? Maybe because they were still advancing without them. Or maybe because, with Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev radioactive dust, no one who could give the orders was still alive.
“Do you think it’s true Adenauer asked Truman not to use the bombs in the western zones?” Max asked.
“Why wouldn’t Adenauer ask? What does he have to lose?” Gustav said. “Whether his asking has anything to do with why they haven’t fallen-that, I can’t tell you.” Adenauer, at least, had the courage of his convictions. He’d been jailed for opposing the Nazis. That gave him some clout with the Amis. How much? Well, who could say for sure?
The firefight off to the left died away. The Russians’ hearts didn’t seem to be in it. Maybe all the bombs that had fallen between the front and where their supplies came from meant they didn’t have enough. It would be nice to think so, anyhow.
Then fire rippled on the eastern horizon-the other side of Alsfeld. Gustav knew too well what that meant. “Get down!” he shouted to anyone who could hear him. “Flatten out! Katyushas!”
Just to make themselves scarier, the rockets screamed when they came in, as if they were Stukas with Jericho trumpets. The whole salvo burst in the space of a few seconds. It could chew up most of a square kilometer. It wasn’t an atom bomb, but was in the running for next worst thing.
Blast kicked Gustav around and slammed him into the dead Mercedes, hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to do any real damage. A chunk of sheet iron from a rocket casing gouged a hole in the fender only thirty or forty centimeters from his head. Too often, whether you got up or they planted you depended on luck like that, stuff you couldn’t do anything about.
“Urra! Urra!” That was Russian infantry, probably snockered from the vodka ration, getting ready to charge. If the hair on Gustav’s nape hadn’t risen for the Katyushas, the rhythmic roar would have turned the trick. The Russians would come forward till they got slaughtered or till they cleared out whatever stood in their way.