"Sure." Sergei poured some liquid fire down his throat. "Damn Poles."
Things in northeastern Poland weren't going as well as they might have. The radio and the newspapers didn't say that, but anyone with a gram of sense could read between the lines. The Red Army kept attacking the same places over and over again. Every attack sounded like a victory. If they were victories, though, why weren't the glorious and peace-loving soldiers of the Soviet Union advancing instead of spinning their wheels?
Not that wheels wanted to spin in weather like this. Supplies moved forward on sledges-when they moved forward at all. Bombers and fighters had long since traded conventional landing gear for ski undercarriages. Men wore skis or snowshoes whenever they went outside.
One of the flyers wound up a phonograph and put on a record. It was Debussy. Sergei relaxed. Nobody listened to Chopin or Mozart or Beethoven any more. Nobody dared. Listening to music by a composer from a country at war with the USSR might be enough to make the NKVD question your loyalty. Who could say for sure why people disappeared? Who wanted to take a chance and find out? But Debussy, a Frenchman, was safe enough.
More explosions, these not so distant. The windows in the hut rattled. "Those are bombs," Mouradian said. "The weather somewhere off to the west is good enough to let airplanes get up."
"Fuck 'em," Koroteyev said. "They're trying to rattle our cage, that's all. They can't find anything to hit, so they drop things anywhere and hope they'll do some good. Fat chance!" He belched and lit a cigarette.
"Even when you can see it, hitting what you aim at isn't easy," Sergei said.
"Turn on the radio, somebody," Mouradian said. "It's just about time for the news."
The flyer closest to the set clicked on the knob. The dial lit up. Half a minute later-once the tubes warmed up-music started blaring out of the speaker. It wasn't quite the top of the hour. The march wasn't to Sergei's taste, but you could put up with anything for a couple of minutes.
"Here is the news," the announcer said.
"Moo," Koroteyev added irreverently. Chuckles ran through the hut. The announcer's accent said he came from the middle reaches of the Volga: he turned a lot of a sounds into o's. It really did make him sound as if he ought to be out in a field chewing his cud.
But what he had to say grabbed everybody's attention: "Spreading their vicious campaign of terror ever more widely, the reactionary Polish junta under the thuggish leadership of Marshal Smigly-Ridz bombed both Minsk and Zhitomir yesterday. Casualties are reported heavy, because neither city was prepared for such treachery and murder. Numbers of innocent schoolchildren are among the slain."
One of the pilots swore violently. He spoke Russian with a Ukrainian accent, so that some of his g's turned into h's. Sergei wondered if he was from Zhitomir or had family there.
"General Secretary Stalin has vowed vengeance against the evil Polish regime," the announcer went on. "Our bombers have targeted Warsaw for retaliation."
Our bombers taking off from where? Sergei wondered. He would have bet piles of rubles that nobody could fly from anywhere near Minsk. Maybe things were better farther south, down toward the Ukraine. He supposed they must have been, or the Poles couldn't have struck at it. In this blizzard, they must have been bombing by dead reckoning-and damned lucky to boot-to hit Minsk at all.
Then the man reading the news said, "Observers in Minsk report that some of the planes striking the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic were German Heinkels and Dorniers. And so we see that the Hitlerites are indeed supporting their semifascist stooges in Warsaw. They too shall suffer the righteous wrath of the workers and people of the Soviet Union."
Several flyers sitting around the table nodded. Sergei started to do the same thing. Then he caught himself. How the devil could observers in Minsk identify the bombers overhead? Minsk wasn't far from here. It had to be as socked in as this miserable airstrip was.
Sergei opened his mouth to say something about that. Before he could, Anastas Mouradian caught his eye. Ever so slightly-Sergei didn't think any of the other flyers noticed it-his copilot shook his head.
The newsman continued, giving more reports of the Poles' atrocities and then going on to talk about the war news from Western Europe. Sergei ended up keeping quiet. Mouradian was bound to be right. If the authorities told lies and you pointed it out, who would get in trouble? The authorities? Or you?
Asking the question was the same as answering it.
Did the rest of the flyers see that the newsman was full of crap when he talked about Minsk? Or didn't they even notice? Were they so used to believing everything they heard on the radio that they couldn't do anything else?
Then something else occurred to Sergei. He grabbed the vodka bottle and took a good swig from it. But not even vodka could drown the subversive thought. If that newsman was lying about the weather in Minsk, what else was he lying about? Had the Poles really bombed the city at all? Had the Germans joined them? How much of what he said about the war in the West was true?
Was anything he said true? Anything at all?
How could you know? How could you even begin to guess? Oh, some things were bound to be true, because what point would there be to lying about them? But others? Had the top ranks of the Soviet military really been as full of traitors and wreckers as the recent purges left people believing? If they hadn't…
Even with the fresh slug of vodka coursing through him on top of everything else he'd drunk, Sergei recognized a dangerous thought when he tripped over one. You couldn't say anything like that, not unless you wanted to find out exactly what kind of weather Siberia had.
Or would they just shoot you if they realized you realized they didn't always tell the truth? He wouldn't have been surprised. What could be more dangerous to the people who ran things?
Anastas watched him from across the table. Did the Armenian know what he was thinking? Did Mouradian think the same things, too? Then Sergei stopped worrying about himself, because the Russian newsman went on, "Since German planes were used in the terror bombings of peaceful Soviet cities, justice demands that we also retaliate against the Fascist Hitlerite swine. This being so, Red Air Force bombers have struck at the Prussian city of Konigsberg. Damage to the enemies of the people is reported to be extremely heavy. They richly deserve the devastation visited upon them!"
"Bozhemoi," whispered somebody down the table from Sergei. It sounded too reverent to be conventional cursing. Nobody reprimanded the flyer, though-not after that news!
No matter what Sergei had been thinking, he didn't doubt this for a moment. The USSR wouldn't claim to have bombed Germany if it hadn't really done it. And if the USSR bombed Germany…In that case, the war against Hitler had just gone from the back burner to the front.
Maybe those were Heinkels and Dorniers up there, inaccurately bombing the airstrip. Maybe Germans in field-gray would join Poles in greenish brown (although the Poles, like the Soviets, had the sense to wear white camouflage smocks in the wintertime). Maybe Hitler and Smigly-Ridz would show the world what the USSR already knew: they'd been in bed with each other all along.
A different announcer exhorted his listeners to buy war bonds. "Help make farmers and workers safe from the threat of Fascism!" he boomed. "Subscribe to the latest war bond program!"
Sergei already bought war bonds. So did everyone else in the Red Air Force and Army and Navy. Contributions came out of their pay before they ever set eyes on it. Losing the money didn't hurt nearly so much that way as it would have if Sergei'd had to dig into his own pockets.
"As long as the Nazis stay busy in the West, we'll do fine against them," Koroteyev said.