"I wonder if we've got any fighters up there," somebody said. "If we do, those Allied shitheads'll be sorry in a hurry."
Hans-Ulrich nodded. He'd listened to Me-109 pilots going on about what sitting ducks British and French bombers were. They couldn't run, they couldn't hide, and they couldn't fight back. He would have liked that better if his Stuka weren't in the same boat. No matter how scary it seemed to the troops on the ground, it couldn't get out of its own way. If the Messerschmitts didn't keep enemy fighters away from them, Ju-87s would tumble out of the sky as often as the Western Allies' bombers did.
"We ought to pay those damned sky pirates back," someone else said, lifting a phrase popular in German papers.
Dieselhorst's snort put paid to that. In case it hadn't, the sergeant went on, "How? We can't take off. Even if the weather didn't stink, some of that load came down on the airstrip. They're going to have to flatten it out again before we can use it. We might as well drink and play skat, because we aren't flying for a while."
A sergeant feeling his oats could sound more authoritative than any major ever hatched. Sergeants mysteriously, mystically knew things. Officers could command, but they didn't have that amazing certainty.
"Anybody think more of those fuckers are coming?" asked a ground-crew man in greasy, muddy coveralls. By his tone, he wanted somebody like Dieselhorst to pat him on the head and say something like, No, don't worry about it. You're safe now.
But no one said anything of the kind. Hans-Ulrich realized he wouldn't have minded some reassurance, either. When the silence had stretched for a bit, the groundcrew man swore again. Maybe that made him feel a little better, anyhow. Rudel didn't usually grant himself even that safety valve, though some of the close calls he'd had on missions made him slip every now and then. He always felt bad about it afterwards, but coming out with something ripe made him feel better when he did it.
He climbed out of the trench and brushed mud and dirt off of himself. "We might as well go back," he said. "The best way to get even with the enemy is to have a good time."
When the Luftwaffe men went back inside their shelter, they found that blast and wind had blown out most of the candles on the Christmas tree. A pilot with a cigarette lighter got them going again. He flicked the lighter closed and put it in his pocket. "God only knows how long I'll be able to get fuel for it," he said. "Then it's back to matches-as long as we have matches."
He wore an Iron Cross First Class. Nobody could accuse him of being a coward or a defeatist…but he sounded like one. Hans-Ulrich wanted to take him aside and talk some sense into him. But when he tried to do that, the people he was talking to had a way of getting angry instead of appreciating his advice. He didn't like it, which didn't mean he hadn't noticed it. He kept his mouth shut.
Caroling some more would have been nice, but nobody seemed to want to. That made a certain amount of sense: if you were listening for airplane engines, you didn't want to be noisy yourself. Rudel missed the music all the same.
Sergeant Dieselhorst had come in with the rest of them. He was drinking schnapps. Soon enough, he was laughing and joking with the rest of the men. Hans-Ulrich wished he could fit in so easily-or at all.
Achilly wind whipped snow through the air almost horizontally. A good coal stove heated the officers' barracks outside of Drisa. All the same, Anastas Mouradian shivered. "I'll never be warm again," he said in his deliberate Russian. "Never, not till July and the five minutes of summer they have here."
Sergei Yaroslavsky and the other men in the barracks were all Russians. They hooted at the effete southerner. They'd all seen plenty of weather worse than this. "Hell, we could fly in this if we had to," Sergei said.
"And we might, too," somebody else added. "Is it five o'clock yet?"
After a glance at his watch, Sergei said, "A couple of minutes till."
"Good," the other flyer said. "Turn on the radio. Let's hear the news."
Mouradian was closest to the set. He clicked it on. It made scratchy, flatulent noises as it warmed up. There were better radios-Yaroslavsky had seen, and heard, that in Czechoslovakia. He didn't say anything about it. Things weren't so bad as they had been during the purges the year before, but a careless word could still make you disappear.
Or you could disappear for no reason. Plenty of people had.
"Comrades! The news!" the announcer said. "In the West, the capitalists and Fascists continue to murder one another." He gave a summary of the day's fighting-or rather, the claims and counterclaims about the day's fighting, finishing, "Plainly, by the lies and contradictions on display, neither side in this struggle of reactionary decadence is to be believed."
"May the Devil's grandmother eat them all up," another pilot said. The sentiment was unexceptionable. The way the man put it wasn't. Russians talked about the Devil and his relations all the time. When the Soviet Union was aggressively atheist, though…Such talk could land you in trouble if someone who didn't like you reported it.
Anything could land you in trouble. Sergei'd just been thinking about that.
"In the Far East, Japanese imperialists continue to encroach on the territory of the fraternal socialist Mongolian People's Republic," the announcer said. "The Foreign Commissar, Comrade Litvinov, has stated that such incursions cannot and will not be tolerated indefinitely."
"Wonder if that's where we go next," Mouradian said. Sergei had wondered the same thing when he was ordered to fly their SB-2 out of the Ukraine. But they'd ended up at the other end of the USSR instead, about as far from the trouble in Mongolia as they could get.
And there might have been reasons for that, because the next words out of the newsreader's mouth were, "The semifascist Smigly-Ridz regime in Poland has once more rejected the Soviet Union's just and equitable demands for an adjustment of the border in the northeast. The Poles still cling to their ill-gotten and illegal gains from the war they waged against the USSR in the early 1920s."
Everybody leaned toward the radio. In portentous tones, the announcer went on, "Comrade Stalin has spoken with grave concern of the way the Polish regime mistreats the ethnic Byelorussians in the area in question. How long the peace-loving Soviet people can tolerate these continued provocations, only time will tell."
He went on to talk about the overfulfillment of the norms for the current Five-Year Plan. Yaroslavsky listened to all that with half an ear; it didn't directly affect him. The other did. When Stalin said he didn't like the way somebody did something, that somebody was commonly very sorry very soon. And hardly anything could make a country sorrier faster than flight after flight of SB-2 bombers.
"I didn't think we'd go," Sergei said. "If the Poles yelled to the Nazis for help, that would put German troops right on our border, and-" He didn't say and that wouldn't be so good. Most of the men in the barracks had served in Czechoslovakia. They knew what rough customers the Hitlerites were.
Anastas Mouradian picked up where he left off: "If the Nazis get bogged down against England and France, they'll be too busy to do anything about what goes on here."
Several flyers nodded. Sergei was one of them; it looked that way to him, too. He would have said it if his crewmate hadn't. "Soldiers are moving up toward the border. So…" The pilot who said that let his voice trail off. He wasn't a general, and he wasn't a prophet. You didn't want to come out with anything that might be remembered too well.
"We aren't going to fly right this minute," another officer said, and produced a bottle of vodka. Despite what Sergei had said before, he was obviously right. The bottle went round. Pretty soon, another one followed it. One more after that and they wouldn't have been able to walk or see, let alone fly. The Red Air Force ran on vodka as surely as it ran on aviation gasoline.