More French mortar bombs were falling on or near the German entrenchments. Down the trench, from the direction in which Corporal Baatz had gone, someone started squalling like a stuck shoat. Was it Awful Arno? Too much to hope for, Willi supposed.
“Be ready when they stop,” he shouted in between explosions. “That’s when the froggies’ll hit us on foot if they’re going to.”
“Right,” Metzger said. “With all this goddamn snow, they’ll be on top of us before we know they’re here.”
“More fun when a girl gets on top of you before you know she’s there,” Willi agreed. Klaus made a face at him. Willi went on, “Why d’you think they’d pick now to try it? I just hope like hell our machine gunners aren’t off playing skat or something.”
“You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you? Funny like the cholera, I mean,” Metzger said.
“That’s me,” Willi said, not without pride.
The mortar bombs quit dropping. Even before officers’ whistles shrilled, urging the men to their posts, Willi was up on a firing step, a round chambered and a fresh clip in his Mauser. Klaus Metzger stood beside him. Both men peered out into the snowstorm.
Was that motion there, or only Willi’s anxious imagination? He didn’t want to wait around and discover he’d made a mistake by getting killed. Nothing up ahead belonged to his own side-he was sure of that. Shoot first and ask questions later, then, just like a Western from America.
Klaus fired a split second after he did. Did the other Landser think he saw something, too. Or was he simply following Willi’s lead? One of their bullets-they never did know which-was rewarded with a scream of anguish. The French soldiers sneaking up under cover of the blizzard opened fire then. Willi shot back, working the Mauser’s bolt as fast as he could.
Other men along the line also banged away. The poilus weren’t close enough to throw grenades into the trenches. Another minute or two of sneaking and they would have been. Willi slapped a new magazine onto his rifle.
Then the Germans’ MG-34s opened up. The froggies cried out in despair. Machine guns put so many rounds in the air, they didn’t have to be either lucky or good to hit you. They just had to keep firing, keep traversing so their bullets didn’t all follow the same path, and sooner or later a man out in the open would stop one. Usually sooner.
The French attack petered out. Willi didn’t know how many casualties the men in the crested helmets and khaki took. The swirling snow kept him from seeing most of them and let the poilus bring them back in their withdrawal. He didn’t think this was a cheap little affair, though.
He turned to Klaus Metzger, who’d stayed steady as a veteran through it all. “You did good,” Willi said, and clapped him on the back. “Here. Take a knock of this.” He offered his canteen, which held some highly unofficial applejack.
“Whew!” Klaus said after drinking. “That’s got teeth, but it sure hits the spot.” They grinned at each other. Willi hoped he’d just made a friend.
Sergei Yaroslavsky wondered what to make of his new copilot and bomb-aimer. Vladimir Federov looked more like a sergeant-or a private first class-than a second lieutenant. He was short and squat and powerful, with a broad face, high cheekbones, and gray-blue eyes that showed nothing. He cropped his sandy hair close to the dome of his skull.
As an infantryman, he obviously would have been first-rate. As a flyer… Sergei wasn’t so sure. Anastas Mouradian talked too damn much. Stas thought too damn much. By all appearances, that wouldn’t be Federov’s problem. But Mouradian was outstanding in the cockpit. Sergei feared that wouldn’t be Federov’s problem, either.
A safe question first: “What’s your father’s name, Comrade Lieutenant?”
“Mikhail, Comrade Pilot.” By his accent, Federov came from somewhere near Moscow. Not from in the city, or Sergei didn’t think so, but also not from somewhere in the backwoods.
“All right, Vladimir Mikhailovich. I’m Sergei Valentinovich.” Maybe Vladimir would turn to Volodya, as Anastas had become Stas. Or maybe not. Yaroslavsky shrugged to himself. Time would tell.
“And our bomb-dropper is…?” Federov asked.
“Ivan Kuchkov. He’s a sergeant, a very strong man, and nothing scares him,” Sergei answered. “Of course, he has his quirks, but who doesn’t?”
“Nobody, I’m sure,” Federov agreed politely. “What are some of his?”
“Why don’t you see for yourself? You’ll meet him soon.” Sergei didn’t want to say that the bomb-aimer made the burly Federov svelte by comparison. He also didn’t want to say Sergeant Kuchkov was one of the hairiest men he’d ever seen, not just on his head but all over his body. People called Kuchkov the Chimp, but not where he could hear them do it: he had a habit of throwing men who used the nickname through windows, doors, walls…
And Sergei didn’t want to say that Ivan conversed almost entirely in mat, the Russian sublanguage of ingenious obscenity. Sergei didn’t even think the bomb-dropper had been a zek before the draft got him. If ever a man was made for mat, Ivan Kuchkov was that man.
Since he didn’t want to say any of those things, he asked, “How did you become a flyer?”
“Oh, the usual way,” Federov replied. “I was in Osoaviakhim when I was a kid, and I did well enough that they kept me at it after I got called up.”
Yaroslavsky nodded. His own story wasn’t much different. Nominally, Osoaviakhim was the national organization that trained civilian pilots. The skills a civilian pilot needed, of course, were the same as the ones flying a fighter or bomber required. No one ever said that out loud, which made it no less true. The Germans had used the same dodge to slide around the Treaty of Versailles’ ban on military aviation.
As Sergei had unpleasant reason to know, Luftwaffe pilots and bombardiers were mostly excellent. As he also had unpleasant reason to know, his own country’s standards were rather lower.
“How’s the plane?” Vladimir Federov asked. “This’ll be the first time I’ve been in an SB-2.”
That news disappointed Sergei without surprising him. Experienced copilots like Mouradian were getting planes of their own. Inexperienced men were getting experience instead. And what do I get? Yaroslavsky wondered. He silently answered his own question: I get to be a nursemaid, that’s what.
Aloud, he said, “When we supported the Spanish Republic, people called the SB-2 the fighting bomber-it was faster in the air than any of the fighters the Fascists were using.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” Federov answered.
“Well, forget it,” Sergei said bluntly. “It was true when we were going up against biplanes. It sure as hell isn’t true any more. German Messerschmitts are like sharks against mackerel. Even the Polish PZLs will out-fly us and outshoot us. What we do when fighters are around is, we run. Otherwise, it’s dos vidanya, Rodina. ”
“ ‘So long, Motherland,’ ” Federov echoed. “So when do we get bombers that can hold their own against enemy fighters?”
“Probably never,” Sergei replied, which made his new copilot give him a long, slow blink. He explained: “Bombers bomb. Fighters shoot bombers down. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s not just obvious. It’s true. Bombers carry more weight, they’re less maneuverable, and they have fewer guns pointing forward. We do our best to hold off fighters, but we can’t play their game. We play our own game instead.”
Lieutenant Federov blinked again, the same way. It was an odd, stagy expression. Sergei wondered what lay behind it. Was Federov an NKVD man building a case against him because he had the gall to point out a plain truth? Too late to worry about it now.
“Come on,” Sergei said. “You want to see the plane? I’ll show you.”
The SB-2 sat in a revetment. A white sheet hid it from prying eyes-and from Nazi reconnaissance aircraft. In the shadow cast by the sheet, a mechanic worked on the starboard engine. He sketched a salute for Sergei and gave Vladimir Federov a curious look: word that Mouradian had been transferred hadn’t got to everybody.