In a low voice, Mouradian said, "The families…" and shook his head.
Sergei needed no more than that to understand what was going on. "Camps?" he asked, dismally sure he knew the answer.
"Da." Anastas Mouradian looked faintly pained that the pilot even needed to say the word. To Russians, Armenians and Georgians seemed sneaky, subtle, devious bastards. You never could trust them. Till now, Sergei had never wondered how he might seem to Anastas. Like a dim backwoods bumpkin? He wouldn't have been surprised.
He wasn't surprised to hear the aircrew's families had been seized, either. If you didn't come back to the Rodina-the motherland-the NKVD would figure you didn't want to. Battle damage? Mechanical failure? The secret police wouldn't give a rat's ass about any of that. They'd scent treason whether it was there or not. And everybody knew treason was contagious. Whether the bomber crew caught it from their families or spread it to them, the families would have to be cauterized.
NKVD men got paid to think like that. Ordinary Soviet citizens had to, if they wanted to stay…well, not safe-nobody was safe-but somewhere close, anyhow.
"Bozhemoi," Sergei muttered. "You're sure?"
Mouradian's dark, bushy eyebrows leapt reproachfully. "If I say something happened, it happened." His voice went hard and flat. "Yob tvoyu mat'," he added-literally, I fuck your mother. As always, tone and emphasis were everything when you said something like that. Said another way, it would have started a fight. But he meant something more like I shit you not.
"All right, all right. I believe you," Yaroslavsky said. "It just…gets to you sometimes, you know?"
"Nichevo," Anastas answered. Everybody in the USSR, Russian or not, used and understood that word. What can you do? or It can't be helped fit too many Soviet scenarios, as it had in the days of the Tsars. Somebody once said Russian peasants ran on cabbage, vodka, and nichevo.
At a pinch, Sergei supposed you could do without cabbage.
As he had before, Mouradian looked around again. His voice dropped again: "You don't want to tell this to the Chimp. He used to drink with the bombardier on the plane that went down."
"He drank with everybody," Sergei said. Sure as hell, Ivan Kuchkov ran on vodka.
"Just keep quiet. He may find out about it anyway, but better he doesn't find out from you," Anastas Mouradian said.
"Right." Sergei nodded. If Ivan found out his drinking buddy was interned and the man's family off to the gulag, he'd want to break something…or somebody. He'd get drunk, which wouldn't make him any cheerier. And he'd babble about where he got the news. All of that could easily add up to trouble. Maybe changing the subject was a good idea: "Hear anything about when we'll start flying again?"
"Not supposed to be too long," the copilot said. "But who knows what that means?"
"Right," Yaroslavsky repeated. Like old Russia, the new USSR always ran late. Five-Year Plans were trying to drag the Soviet Union into a consciousness of time like that in the West. Clocks sprouted everywhere, like toadstools. But with a language where the verb to be had no present tense, how far could the apparatchiks go with their changes?
Sergei thanked the God in Whom he wasn't supposed to believe that that was somebody else's worry. He just had to follow orders and not think too much. He was sure he could manage that.
A corporal in the groundcrew came over to him. "Sir, Captain Kuznetsov wants to see you right away."
"I'm coming." Yaroslavsky couldn't suppress a nasty twinge of fear. "Did he say why?" he asked. Was he bound for Siberia? Did Kuznetsov get a command to take him out and shoot him? Sometimes following your own orders and not thinking too much wouldn't save you. Sometimes nothing would.
But the corporal shook his head. "No, sir. Only that he wants to see you."
"I serve the Soviet Union!" Sergei hurried off toward the captain's tent. Anastas Mouradian nodded to him as he went. Something glinted in the Armenian's dark eyes. Sympathy? Anastas was no fool. He knew all the things that could happen. He knew they could happen to him, too. The corporal, by contrast, was too dumb and too stolid ever to get in trouble.
When Sergei ducked into the tent, he was relieved to see no uniformed strangers standing next to Captain Kuznetsov, who sat at a rickety table doing paperwork by the light of a kerosene lamp. Kuznetsov looked up and set down his pen. "Ah. Yaroslavsky." His tone could have meant anything-or nothing.
Sergei saluted. "Reporting as ordered, sir." If he was going down, he'd go down with style. Not that that would do him any goddamn good, either.
"Da," Kuznetsov said, again with nothing special in his voice. Then he went on, "Make sure you and your airplane are ready to fly out of here first thing tomorrow morning."
"Yes, sir!" Sergei couldn't keep the relief from his voice. An order that was a real order! "Uh, sir…Where are we flying to?"
"To Drisa, northwest of Polotsk," Captain Kuznetsov answered. "It's right near the Polish and Lithuanian borders-and it's about as close to East Prussia as we can get while we stay in the Rodina."
"I see." Yaroslavsky wondered if he did. "Will we be flying against Germany again, then, sir?"
"We have no orders for that at the present time," his superior said. He didn't go on to say whether he thought it was likely or unlikely. Sergei didn't presume to press him, either. If you gave an opinion that turned out to be wrong, somebody would make you pay for it. If you kept your mouth shut, no one could pin anything on you.
Along with the rest of the SB-2s in the squadron (except for one grounded by bad hydraulics), Sergei's flew out at first light the next morning. Ivan Kuchkov was badly hung over. Yaroslavsky wouldn't have wanted to fly like that, not with the two big engines throbbing and growling away. Nothing the bombardier could do about it, though, not unless he wanted to try his luck with the stockade-or, more likely, the NKVD. If Kuchkov complained, the engines' thrum kept anybody else from hearing him.
Russia scrolled along below the bomber: farmland and forest and swamp, with here and there a town looking all but lost in the vastness of the landscape. Puddles in the Pripet Marshes reflected the gray sky. Mouradian minded the map and made sure the bomber didn't stray too far west and end up in Polish airspace. Sergei wasn't afraid of what the Poles would do to him. They flew nothing close to the deadly German Messerschmitts. But what his own superiors would do to him for screwing up didn't bear thinking about.
"Drisa's in Byelorussia, yes?" Mouradian asked.
"Yes," Sergei agreed.
The Armenian sighed. "They'll talk like the Devil's uncle, then."
Russians didn't have any trouble following Byelorussian. Russians could follow Ukrainian, which differed more from their language. And of course Byelorussians and Ukrainians had to understand Russian. But Anastas Mouradian had learned it in school. He spoke well, and understood standard Russian well. Its cousins, though, weren't open books to him, the way they were to Sergei.
North of the Pripet Marshes, patches of snow started showing up on the ground. It would be colder here. Sergei suspected he would spend a lot of time in his flight suit. Leather and fleece that could keep out the cold at 8,000 meters could do the same against even the Russian winter.
He landed the SB-2 on a dirt strip outside of Drisa-an unprepossessing place if ever there was one. His teeth clicked together when the plane touched down. The runway was anything but smooth. He didn't bite his tongue, though. And the SB-2 was built to take it. As he brought the bomber to a stop, he wondered how much it would have to take, and how soon.