Next morning, Father rolled a cigarette of tobacco scavenged from other people’s discarded dog-ends. A certain predatory gleam lit his eyes as he walked out the front door. “I wonder what we’ll be cleaning up today,” he said.
In smashed houses, the laborers stole whatever they could: real cigarettes, food, clothes. Once, Herr Doktor Professor Samuel Goldman would have been ashamed to do such a thing. Not Samuel Goldman the work-gang man. Sarah understood the change only too well. What Jew in Nazi Germany had any room left for shame?
Anastas Mouradian went through the preflight checklist in the cockpit of his Pe-2 with meticulous care. His copilot and bomb-aimer, Isa Mogamedov, sat in the other chair there. He helped Mouradian run down the list.
They spoke to each other in Russian, the only language they had in common. Each flavored it with a different accent. Their home towns lay only a hundred kilometers or so apart, but neither knew or wanted to know a word of the other’s native tongue. Mouradian was an Armenian, Mogamedov an Azeri. Their peoples had been rivals and enemies for a thousand years, ever since the Turkic Azeris invaded the Caucasus. Mouradian had been born a Christian, Mogamedov a Muslim. Now they both had to do their best to be New Soviet Men.
“Comrade Pilot, everything seems normal,” Mogamedov said formally when they got to the end of the checklist.
“Thank you, Comrade Copilot. I agree,” Mouradian replied with equal formality. New Soviet Men had no business quarreling with one another, especially when the Fascist enemy remained on Soviet soil.
Part of Stas Mouradian wanted to believe all the Soviet propaganda that had bombarded him since he was very small. Part of him simply thought some personnel officer had played a practical joke on him by sticking an Azeri in his cockpit. But Mogamedov was plenty capable. With that being true, Mouradian could ignore the rest.
He could, and he had to. Russians didn’t officially dominate the Soviet Union the way they had in the Tsar’s empire. The leader of the USSR, after all, came out of the Caucasus himself-Stalin was a Georgian. But, even though he spoke the country’s chief language with an accent thick enough to slice, Stalin often acted more Russian than the Tsars. Any of the blackasses-Russian slang for the mostly swarthy folk of the southern mountains-who wanted to get ahead needed to do the same.
Mouradian not only wanted to get ahead, he wanted to get airborne. He shouted into the speaking tube that led back to the bomb bay: “Everything good for you, Fetya?”
“Everything’s fucking wonderful, Comrade Pilot,” Sergeant Fyodor Mechnikov replied. The bombardier was a Russian, all right: a foulmouthed thug dragged off a collective farm and into the Red Air Force. He was as strong as an ox-another reason his station was back there with the heavy packages of explosives-and not a great deal brighter.
But if everything looked good to him, too … Stas waved through the bulletproof glass of the windscreen to the waiting groundcrew men. They waved back and spun first one prop, then the other. Smoke and flames burst from the exhausts as the engines bellowed to life. Mouradian eyed the jumping needles on the instrument panel. Fuel, oil pressure, hydraulics … Again, everything seemed inside the normal range.
He waved to the groundcrew men once more. They pulled the chocks away from the Pe-2’s wheels. Mouradian eased up on the brake and gave the plane more throttle. It bounced down the dirt runway west of Smolensk. The runway was barely long enough to let a fully loaded bomber take off. Stas pulled back hard on the yoke. The Pe-2’s nose came up. If anything went wrong now, he’d be dead, and the bombs would make sure there was nothing left of him to bury.
But nothing went wrong. The Pe-2 climbed into the air. The ground fell away below it. The SB-2, the plane this machine replaced, had been a typical piece of Soviet engineering: homely but functional, at least till it went obsolete. Comrade Petlyakov’s bomber, by contrast, was slim and elegant. It had started life as a two-engined fighter, and still wasn’t helpless against Nazi 109s.
Mouradian took his place in the V of planes winging west to pound the Hitlerites’ positions somewhere east of Minsk. The Germans had fallen back a good deal since England and France started up the war in the West again. They didn’t have enough men or machines to do everything the Führer wanted.
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? Some foreign poet had said that. Stas couldn’t remember who. Hitler’s reach had exceeded his grasp, and a lot of Germans were going to hell on account of it.
Now I have to make sure they don’t send me to the Devil to keep them company, Mouradian thought. If you flew long enough, your number was bound to come up. He hadn’t flown long enough yet, the proof of which was that he was still flying. If I make it through the war, I won’t go any higher than the top floor of a three-story building.
He felt faintly embarrassed thinking about the Devil or making a wheedling bargain with God. There wasn’t supposed to be room for either in a New Soviet Man’s philosophy. But plenty of others acted the same way. When things went wrong, you’d hear Russians screaming about the Devil’s uncle over the radio. Their fathers would have let out the same curses in the last war, and their great-great-great-grandfathers while fighting Napoleon.
Antiaircraft fire came up at the Pe-2s. Stas did some cussing of his own: they hadn’t crossed the front yet, so that was their own side shooting at them. It happened about every other mission. Maybe the Pe-2 looked too slick-the dumb bastards down on the ground figured it had to be German. Or maybe that had nothing to do with anything. Red Army men had fired on Stas in an SB-2, too. Too many soldiers thought any airplanes flying over them had to be dangerous.
“Approaching the target!” The squadron commander’s voice blared in Stas’ earphones, and in Mogamedov’s as well. “Prepare for the bomb run.”
“Acknowledged,” Mouradian answered. Mogamedov slid down to the glassed-in bottom of the nose to man the bombsight.
There it was, all right: a big supply dump by a railroad spur, with trucks and wagons hauling munitions up to the troops who banged heads with their Soviet counterparts. Mouradian pushed the yoke forward, and the bomber’s nose went down. He used the dive brakes to control and steepen his descent. The Pe-2 couldn’t stand on its nose like a Stuka, but it was a far better all-around aircraft.
“Bombs away, Fetya!” Mogamedov yelled.
“Bombs away!” Mechnikov echoed. “The whores are fucking gone!” And they were. Mouradian heard them tumble out of their racks and felt the plane, suddenly a tonne lighter, get friskier under his hands.
He needed all the friskiness he could find, too. Bf-109s tore into the squadron, pouncing from on high and pounding the bombers with heavy machine guns and cannon shells. A pair of Pe-2s tumbled out of the sky, both burning, one with half a wing shot away. Stas didn’t see any parachutes open. He hoped the flyers died fast and without too much pain.
He hoped he didn’t die in the next few minutes. The machine gun in the dorsal turret spat out a long burst, and then another one. Mechnikov was on the job. He probably wouldn’t shoot down a 109 attacking from above and behind. He might make the pilot pull up and spoil the bastard’s aim.
He must have, because the Pe-2 didn’t crash. Half the needles on the gauges were at the edge of the red, but that was because Stas had mashed the throttle hard against the panel wall. The needles didn’t leap crazily into the danger zone, the way they would have if the Nazi had shot the engines full of holes.
Most of the time, Stas would have tried to gain altitude. Now he stayed down on the deck, hoping the German fighters would have a hard time spotting his brown and green plane against the ground below. It must have worked-no Messerschmitt shot him down.