“Nichevo-right,” Obolensky said. “But there’s a difference between not being able to do anything about it and swimming around in gravy before you jump into the wolf’s mouth.”
“I guess so, Comrade Lieutenant. You’re a goddamn good guy, you know?”
“Spasibo,” Obolensky said gravely.
“You’re a goddamn good guy,” Ivan repeated, “but fuck ’em all anyway. I’ve been doing this shit too cocksucking long. I’m not scared any more. I don’t want ’em to jug me, but I’m fucking sick of worrying about it. They shoot me? So, fine-they shoot me. They send me to Kolyma? Kolyma can’t be too much worse than some of the fuck-storms I’ve already been through.”
“I believe you,” Obolensky said slowly. “The NKVD would have a much harder time keeping the country in line if everybody felt that way.”
Ivan only shrugged. What he really wanted to do was ask the lieutenant who’d blabbed about him. He didn’t waste his time, though. Obolensky wouldn’t tell him. He knew as much without asking. In the lieutenant’s footwraps, he wouldn’t have answered a question like that, either. Obolensky needed people to tell him things. And if Ivan found out who the rat was, that bitch would be a fatal accident that hadn’t happened yet.
So Kuchkov shrugged one more time. He might be able to find out without asking anybody, at least in so many words. He might not read or write, but he sure as hell could add two and two.
Then he could fix things so the Banderists did his dirty work for him. Or if not them, the Japs. Sooner or later, the regiment would head for the Far East. The Japs were supposed to be just as much fun as the Germans, only in a different way. Yeah, they’d give plenty of chances for payback. You bet they would!
The big, snorting American lorry rolled away from the front. “And so we bid farewell to beautiful, romantic Belgium,” Alistair Walsh said grandly as he sat in the back with a squad’s worth of men. “We say good-bye to the exotic natives and their quaint and curious customs, and to our fellow holidaymakers from the strange and distant land of Deutsch.”
“Blimey,” Jack Scholes said. “Staff’s gone clean barmy, ’e ’as.” By the way the rest of the Tommies nodded and rolled their eyes, they sided with the gritty little private. No, Scholes had a new lance-corporal’s single chevron on his left sleeve: a parting gift, as it were. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t earned the stripe the hard way.
“Not me,” Walsh said. “You blokes have no poetry in your souls-that’s what the trouble is.”
“Or m’ybe you’ve got rocks in your ’ead,” Scholes said. Again, by all the signs a vote would have gone his way.
Walsh pulled a new packet of Navy Cuts out of his breast pocket. After lighting his own, he passed the cigarettes around. “He may be balmy, but he’s not a bad old bugger,” one of the soldiers said, as if he weren’t there. Most of the others nodded one more time. They were, after all, enjoying his bounty. He was about as much a politician as any other staff sergeant, and not shy about buying popularity.
The canvas top was spread over its steel hoops to keep sun and rain off the passengers in the truck. Walsh could see out the back, but that wasn’t much of a view: the road the truck had just traveled over, and a little off to one side of it. The farther from the front they got, the fewer the smashed trees and flattened houses he spotted.
“Bloody fucking hell,” said Gordon McAllister, who sat next to him. The big Scot’s burr only added to the sincerity of the sentiment. “We lived through it.” He didn’t talk much. When he did, it was to the point.
Unless we run over a mine or something ran through Walsh’s head. He left it there. You didn’t want to say some things, for fear of making them come true. Any educated toff would tell you such magical thinking was superstitious nonsense. Walsh didn’t care. Not mentioning such things couldn’t make matters worse.
On they went. They met no mines, for which the staff sergeant was duly grateful. They did have to get off the road once, to jounce along on a corduroyed track through a field. When they came back to the paving, Walsh saw why they’d left: a repair crew was filling in an enormous crater.
“Fritzes must’ve dropped that one about an hour before the shooting stopped,” Scholes said.
“Why’d they send us down this stinking road, then?” somebody else asked. “Couldn’t they find one without a big fucking hole in it?”
That was one of those questions without any answer, of course. Maybe the fellow who’d planned the withdrawal had no idea about the bomb crater. Maybe he’d figured the corduroyed stretch would handle the traffic. Maybe he hadn’t given a damn one way or the other. Maybe the driver was lost.
Or maybe, and perhaps more likely, nobody’d given a damn one way or the other. The British Expeditionary Force was leaving Belgium. By lorry, by train, by bus, and, for all Walsh knew, by stagecoach, the Tommies were pulling out and heading for Calais and the other Channel Ports. Pretty soon, they’ll all be off the Continent and back in Blighty again.
Most of their German counterparts were already out of Belgium and Holland and even Luxembourg and back in the Vaterland. Walsh wondered what the Salvation Committee would do with all the young men they’d have to demobilize, and how unhappy those young men would prove when they had trouble finding work.
For that matter, he wondered how his own country would cope with swarms of demobilized soldiers looking for jobs. That hadn’t been easy the last time around. This go looked no easier.
It wasn’t his problem, though. The people who would have to worry about it were the bright young men in the government: the bright young men who were his friends and acquaintances, thanks to an accident of fate.
If Rudolf Hess had chosen to parachute into some other field … Walsh shook his head. In that case, someone else would have fetched the deputy Führer to the authorities, and one Alistair Walsh never would have found his affairs commingled with those of the great, the famous, and the powerful. But Hess had come down in that field outside of Dundee, and Walsh had taken him back into the town, and nothing was the same as it would have been otherwise. Better? Worse? How could he know? But surely different.
He wondered what had happened to Hess since Hitler’s untimely demise. He didn’t recall hearing anything about Hess since then, not that the man with the bushy eyebrows died a brave Nazi death, not that he was still alive and fighting, not that he’d been captured, not … anything.
His high-placed friends would know. Once he got back to England, he could find out. If he remembered. If he didn’t, that wasn’t the biggest thing in the world, either.
After a while, the lorry pulled off onto the shoulder. “Break time,” the driver announced. “Grab some grub, brew some char, go off into the bushes and set your minds at ease.”
“I don’t keep my mind there,” Walsh said.
“You’ve got to remember, Staff-you’re gettin’ old,” Jack Scholes said. The other Tommies in the back of the truck chuckled. The driver whooped-Walsh couldn’t give him trouble once this ride ended.
They washed down whatever they happened to have on them with tea brewed over smokeless cookers. Then they climbed back into the lorry. Before long, they crossed from Belgium into France. Walsh never would have known it, except that they passed two flagpoles, one flying a tricolor of black, yellow, and red, the other a red, white, and blue three-striper.
As night was falling, the lorry pulled into a tent city on the outskirts of Calais. “This is where I came in,” Walsh said. “Where I came in three different times, as a matter of fact.”
“Next time you get over ’ere, you can pay your own way,” Scholes said with a sly grin.