“You got the bastard!” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s voice through the speaking tube was like sounding brass. “Engine’s on fire, crew’s bailing out.”
“Good.” Rudel couldn’t see behind him, so he had to rely on the radioman’s reports. Experience in France and here had taught him to aim for the engine compartment. Almost any panzer’s armor was thinnest on the decking there. He manhandled the Stuka into a climbing turn. “Let’s see if we can kill another one, or maybe more than one.”
The pillar of greasy black smoke rising from the rear of the panzer he’d struck told him it wouldn’t be going anywhere any more. He nodded to himself in somber satisfaction. He’d killed a lot of enemy armor with the big guns. He must have killed a lot of enemy panzer crewmen, too, but he tried not to dwell on that.
After he’d gained enough altitude, he chose another whitewashed Russian panzer and tipped the Stuka into a new dive. Again, the Jericho trumpets howled. This time, though, they didn’t take the Ivans on the ground by surprise. Hans-Ulrich had a low opinion of Russian brains, but not of Russian balls. The Reds opened up on the Stuka with their small arms. The commander of Rudel’s new target vehicle fired a burst from the turret with a submachine gun.
All that might have made the Ivans happier, but did them no good. You couldn’t shoot accurately at a dive bomber from the ground-it was going too fast. Even if you got lucky and hit it, the engine and the compartment that housed the two crewmen were armored against rifle-caliber bullets.
Blam! Blam! The Stuka’s big guns thundered again, at almost the same instant. Hans-Ulrich pulled out of the dive. He brought his fist down on his thigh in triumph when Sergeant Dieselhorst reported that he’d nailed another one. “Aim to go after number three?” Dieselhorst asked.
“Why not?” Rudel said. “Hardly any Russian panzers carry radios. They won’t call fighters after us.”
“Some do, so you hope they won’t,” the veteran underofficer replied.
That was nothing but the truth. Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to meet fighters, not in his ungainly machine. He got more ground fire in this dive than he had before. At least one lucky round clanged into the Stuka, but it did no harm. And when the 37mm guns belched fire once more, they wrecked another Soviet panzer.
Part of Rudel wanted to go after a fourth Russian machine, but common sense told him that was a bad idea. Sooner or later, fighters blazoned with the red star would show up around here. The best thing he could do was to be somewhere else when they did. He hauled the Stuka’s nose around and flew off to the west.
Ivan Kuchkov counted himself lucky to be alive. He was a short, squat, brawny Russian peasant. The authorities had yanked him off the collective farm where he grew up and put him in the bomb bay of an SB-2 medium bomber. Short, squat, and brawny were ideal qualifications for a bombardier. Smart wasn’t, and nobody, including Ivan himself, had ever claimed he was.
He hadn’t tried to keep track of how many missions he’d flown, for instance. He just knew there’d been a lot of them. He also knew that, if you flew a lot of missions against the Nazis, you were waiting for the law of averages to catch up with you.
And it did. The Tupolev bomber had got hit and caught fire on the way back from a run into German-held Byelorussia. Kuchkov bailed out. He didn’t think either the pilot or the copilot and bomb-aimer made it. He’d flown with Sergei Yaroslavsky ever since they “volunteered” to aid Czechoslovakia against Fascist invaders when the war was new. Unless his brain was totally fucked, he wouldn’t be flying with the lieutenant any more.
He wasn’t sure he’d be flying at all. Red Army men rescued him and got him away from the Germans after he landed. The first lieutenant commanding the company didn’t want to give him back to the Red Air Force. Lieutenant Pavel Obolensky recognized a hard-nosed son of a bitch when he saw one. Obolensky wanted Kuchkov fighting for him.
“The air force? Faggots fight in the air force,” the lieutenant declared. “You’re a real man, right? Real men belong in the Red Army!”
That was nonsense, as Kuchkov had reason to know. “I bet my bombs killed more Fascists than all the fuckers in your cocksucking regiment, sir,” he said. He wasn’t being deliberately disrespectful. He just spoke mat, the obscenity-laced underworld and underground dialect of Russian, as naturally as he breathed. He almost didn’t know how not to swear.
Luckily for him, Lieutenant Obolensky, like Yaroslavsky, recognized as much and didn’t come down on him on account of his foul mouth. “Maybe they did,” the infantry officer said. “But fuck your mother if we don’t get to watch the cunts die when we nail ’em.” Like most Russians, he could use mat, too, even if he didn’t make a habit of it the way Kuchkov did.
“You’ve got something there,” Ivan admitted. He thought it over, then nodded. “Why the hell not?” Remembering such manners as he owned, he saluted. “Uh, sir.”
For the moment, the Red Air Force probably thought he was as dead as the rest of the SB-2’s crew. That made turning into a foot soldier easier. One of these days, his proper service would figure out that he’d kept breathing after all. That was likely to complicate his life. But it wasn’t as if he’d deserted, and he’d never been one to borrow trouble. Plenty came along on its own, thank you very much.
Such calculations had nothing to do with his choice. Along with being short and squat and strong, he was dark and ugly and uncommonly hairy. In the Red Air Force, they called him the Chimp. He hated it. Anyone who came right out and used the nickname to his face, he did his best to deck, and his best was goddamn good. But he knew people called him Chimp behind his back. Maybe joining up with a bunch of strangers would let him escape it.
He might be rugged as a boulder, but he was curiously naive. He could get away from the nickname he despised for about twenty minutes-half an hour, tops. As soon as anybody with even a little imagination got a look at him, he was as sure to be tagged Chimp (or maybe King Kong) as a redhead was to get stuck with Red or Rusty.
Lieutenant Obolensky was making calculations of his own. The main one was that Sergeant Kuchkov would be worth eight or ten ordinary guys in a fight. At least. And so the lieutenant grinned when Kuchkov didn’t make a fuss about staying in the air force.
“Ochen khorosho!” Obolensky exclaimed. As far as he was concerned, it was very good indeed. “Let’s get you kitted out.”
Ivan’s fur-lined flight suit gave him better cold-weather gear than most of his new comrades enjoyed. Thanks to Obolensky, though, he got a white snow smock to put over it. He also got a tunic with collar tabs in infantry crimson rather than air force blue. And he got a submachine gun to replace the Tokarev pistol he carried as a personal weapon. He didn’t ditch the pistol, though. You never could tell when an extra weapon would come in handy.
He’d maintained the machine guns in the SB-2’s dorsal and belly turrets. Next to them, the PPD-34 might have been a kiddy toy. It was plainer and uglier than the Nazis’ Schmeisser, but it had a seventy-one-round drum magazine. That made it heavier than a Schmeisser, but so what? It kept firing a lot longer, too. He knew he’d have to clean the magazine even more often than the weapon itself, which boasted a chromed barrel and chamber. Dirt could foul the clockwork mechanism that fed cartridges into the PPD. A jam was more likely to prove fatal than just embarrassing. No jams, then.
Ivan shifted the three metal triangles that marked his rank from old collar tabs to new. Lieutenant Obolensky gave him a squad right away-infantry units took more than their share of casualties, and Obolensky had had a corporal who barely needed to shave running it. The junior-very junior-noncom didn’t resent losing the position he hadn’t held long. Lucky for him, too; if he had, Kuchkov would have whaled the piss out of him.