“Red Army forces have struck more and more heavy blows against the Fascist and reactionary invaders west and south of Smolensk,” the newsreader went on. “The enemy’s tanks continue to show themselves unable to face in the field the latest products of Soviet engineering.”
Radio Moscow gave forth with great steaming piles of propaganda. Anyone with an ear to hear-which Mouradian certainly owned-knew that. Here, though, as best he could tell, the announcer meant every word. The new heavy tanks named for General Kliment Voroshilov were bigger and tougher than anything the Nazis or their friends built. Facing Panzer IIs-even Panzer IIIs-a KV-1 was like a bear against a pack of yapping dogs. But the KV-1s came in ever-growing packs, too.
“Farther south,” the radio newsman went on, “the soldiers of the glorious Red Army are being welcomed as liberators in Bessarabia, which the Romanians stole while reactionary forces attempted to strangle the infant Soviet Union in its cradle.”
That sounded impressive. Mouradian wasn’t old enough to remember much about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. He remembered that Armenia had been independent for a little while, and then part of a bigger Trans-Caucasian Soviet Socialist Republic. Then, after the Whites and their foreign allies were beaten, Moscow reasserted its authority over the region. No, he didn’t remember all the political details. What he mostly remembered was going hungry all the time.
Anyone who’d lived through the Revolution had memories like that. If you were a Ukrainian, you had several sets of them, and you were probably lucky to be alive. Rumors said lots of Ukrainians welcomed German and Polish soldiers the way the radio reported the Bessarabians were welcoming the Red Army. The louder and more stridently Radio Moscow denied those rumors, the more Stas believed them.
“Unrest in England against the government’s unnatural alliance with the Hitlerite barbarians continues to grow,” the newsreader said. “Police have been uncommonly brutal in suppressing demonstrations against Prime Minister Wilson.”
He went on to talk about ever-swelling Soviet war production. Plan after plan was overfulfilled, quota after quota exceeded. Stas wondered if he was the only flyer listening who thought about what would happen if people demonstrated against Stalin in Red Square. The NKVD, which was commonly brutal, would be uncommonly so for something like that. Would captured protesters be killed out of hand or sent to the gulags so they had more time to think about what reckless fools they’d been? An interesting question. Either way, the poor devils wouldn’t like the answer.
There was war news in the Pacific, too. Mouradian couldn’t make much of it, not least because the announcer kept stumbling over unfamiliar place names. He gathered that Japan was advancing and everyone else falling back. Having served for a while in the Far East, Mouradian knew only too well that the Japanese were no bargain. Now the rest of the world was discovering the same thing.
Germany and her friends were no bargain, either. Japan could annoy and gnaw at the Soviet Union, and had done exactly that. But thousands of kilometers separated her from the USSR’s vitals. If Hitler paraded through Moscow in a Mercedes, could Stalin keep up the fight from Sverdlovsk or Kuibishev or some other town on the far side of the Urals? Mouradian had his doubts. He suspected Stalin did, too.
Which meant the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would move heaven and earth to keep the Nazis out of Moscow and as far from the USSR’s capital as he could. It also meant Mouradian moved through the heavens toward Mogilev, which had recently fallen to the invaders. Along with him in the Pe-2 moved a thousand kilos’ worth of bombs. Stalin wouldn’t care that a stubborn Armenian was flying. The explosives, though, the explosives would matter to the director of the Soviet state.
The squadron’s target was the railroad yard. Maybe withdrawing Soviet troops hadn’t torn it up well enough. Maybe enemy railroad men had got it back in operation faster than the Russians figured they could. Keeping trains from going through Mogilev would help defend Smolensk, and Smolensk was Moscow’s most important shield.
Fires and plumes of greasy black smoke from burning tanks marked the front between Mogilev and Smolensk. Not all the burning armor came out of enemy factories. Soviet light tanks were still depressingly easy to kill. And even the KV-1s could go up in flames. Maybe some German Panzer III got lucky, or maybe the foe had a field gun in a good place.
In the Pe-2’s cockpit, Ivan Kulkaanen turned to Mouradian and said, “The stinking Fascists aren’t having it all their own way, anyhow.”
“No, they aren’t,” Stas agreed. Yes, that was true. But he would have felt obliged to agree even if the Nazis were driving the Red Army back headlong. Disagreeing with something like that would have been defeatism. England might tolerate such disagreement in wartime-or, if the morning news held any truth, might not. The Soviet Union never had and never would.
A few antiaircraft shells burst near the formation of Pe-2s. Stas didn’t see any planes catch fire or go down. That was good news. They flew on. Once they got past the front, things quieted down. It often worked out that way. If the Germans didn’t also have plenty of antiaircraft guns in and around Mogilev, though, Stas would be happily surprised.
After a while, he didn’t just hear the engines’ drone. It became a part of him, so that his toenails, his muscles, his spine, and his spleen all vibrated to the same rhythm. The oxygen-enriched air tasted of rubber and leather.
Kulkaanen pointed through the armor-glass windshield. A city lay ahead. Unless the squadron had really buggered up its navigation, that had to be Mogilev. They’d dive to make the attack more accurate. Pe-2s weren’t Stukas; they didn’t stand on their noses to deliver ordnance. (They could also fly rings around the clumsy German bombers.) But they did have dive brakes, and used them on attack runs.
That also brought them down closer to the flak gunners on the ground. Stas tried not to dwell on such things as the slotted flaps lowered and grabbed air. “Be ready,” he called to Fyodor Mechnikov back in the narrow bomb bay.
“What the hell else am I gonna be-sir?” the bombardier answered through the speaking tube. Behind goggles and oxygen mask, Mouradian grinned. Sure as the devil, it was almost like flying with Ivan Kuchkov again.
The Germans did have guns waiting for the Soviet bombers. Stas wished he were more astonished. Yes, they’d protect the railroad yards. And yes, they’d probably got a few minutes’ warning. Unlike Russians, Germans knew what to do with a few minutes’ warning, too.
Had he flown through heavier flak? He supposed he must have, but he couldn’t remember offhand just when. Something tore half the left wing off the Pe-2 diving next to his. The stricken bomber spun out of control. The crew had no chance to bail out.
“Now!” Stas yelled through the speaking tube. As soon as the bombs fell free, he leveled out and scooted away at full throttle and low altitude. Any Messerschmitt pilot who wanted to run him down was welcome to try. He turned back toward Soviet-held territory. The railroad yard, or something in its neighborhood, had taken one mighty thorough pounding.
Of course, the bombs also came down on the heads of the people who still lived in Mogilev. Stas’ superiors thought they’d do more harm to the enemy than to Soviet citizens. He had to hope they were right.
Spring was in the air outside Madrid… spring and the stink of shit and garbage and unburied bodies, and the occasional bullet or shell fragment. But when things started turning green, when the birds came back from the south, Chaim Weinberg was less inclined to be critical.
Mike Carroll gave him a peculiar look when he started going on about birdsong. “Chirp, chirp,” the other Abe Lincoln said. “Hot diggety dog.”