Someone whose watch had survived said they left port at half past two. They’d have several hours of darkness to get well out to sea. Nights were still long, though beginning to shorten. They’d be a small needle in a big haystack. It could work. It really could.
Walsh kept telling himself as much, right up to the point where he fell asleep. He was mostly standing up, with his head and arms resting against something metallic. Even through his greatcoat sleeves, he could feel the cold. He didn’t care. He thought he could have slept upside down.
Someone trod on his toe. Someone else planted an elbow in his ribs. Each indignity half roused him, but no more. Even this was better than life in the trenches. And if that wasn’t a judgment on the war he’d been fighting… He snored on.
He came back to himself with the sky beginning to go gray in the east. Some good Samaritan was shoving his way through the tight-packed soldiers with an enormous pot of tea in each fist. Walsh still had his mess kit. He held out the tin cup, and was rewarded with a weak, lukewarm brew with no milk and not enough sugar. It tasted wonderful.
As day came on, the soldiers looked apprehensively back toward the corrugated coastline from which they’d just fled. The destroyer was going flat out, kicking up an enormous bow wave. But one of the mournful lessons of this war was that ships couldn’t outrun airplanes.
Lots of ocean. Only us here, Walsh thought. The other ships taking the expeditionary force back from Namsos had scattered. The Nazis would have to find them one by one. Walsh thought that made for good tactics. He wished to God he were more certain.
Sailors looked back toward Norway, too. Some of them had field glasses. One who did shouted out a warning. Walsh wondered why he bothered. The antiaircraft guns were already manned. The escaping soldiers couldn’t go anywhere, because their mates already filled the places where they might have gone.
Walsh’s mouth went dry when he recognized the sharkish fuselage with the inverted gull wings. A Stuka. We would get a bloody Stuka, he thought bitterly. He’d seen what they could do. He didn’t want them trying to do it to him… again.
“Only the one bugger,” Dr. Murdoch said beside him. That was something. The Germans must have scattered their planes across the ocean, searching for ships. Of course, the sods up there would have a wireless set…
The Stuka climbed, then dove. Walsh watched in fearful fascination-what else could he do? All the antiaircraft guns on the destroyer went off at once, with a noise like the end of the world. The pilot took his plane down through the shell bursts as if they weren’t there. Fritz or not, he had balls. The bomb fell free. The dive-bomber pulled up almost as sharply as it had plunged.
Blam! The bomb burst-about fifty yards astern of the destroyer. The ship jerked as if she’d taken a left to the belly, but kept steaming. Here and there, men peppered-or men ripped to shreds-by fragments shrieked.
“I didn’t see any more bombs under his wings. Perhaps they sacrificed payload for range,” Murdoch said. Walsh hadn’t noticed. The Stuka didn’t seem to be coming back for another pass. It droned east, toward Norway, instead.
“We may live to see Blighty again,” Walsh said. A moment before, he wouldn’t have given tuppence for his chances. Hope-and exhaustion-made for a happier drunk than even champagne. He threw back his head and laughed.
Anastas Mouradian had got used to the way Russians did things in Europe. Got resigned to the way they did things might have put it better. You had to get used to it, get resigned to it, or you’d go mad. There were far more Russians than any other group in the USSR, especially when you added in the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, who weren’t very different from Great Russians. (Great Russians insisted they were only variations on a theme. Ukrainians and Byelorussians disagreed, but usually just among themselves.)
Used to Russian ways or not, Stas didn’t think it was an accident that so many Armenians and Georgians and Jews had risen so high in the Soviet hierarchy. Russians were stubborn. They were brave. They followed orders even better than Germans. From all he’d seen, though, few of them would ever set the world on fire with their brains.
Now here he was in eastern Siberia. It was like finding himself in a satiric movie. All the most Russian traits that annoyed him in Europe were exaggerated here.
Everything was slipshod. Even in Europe, aircraft maintenance hadn’t been what he wished it would be. The Russian attitude was Oh, what the hell-it’ll probably fly. Most of the time, it did. But not all the planes that didn’t come back ran into German fighters. Some never should have tried to get off the ground to begin with.
If it was bad in Europe, it was worse out here. Spare parts were in chronically short supply-no surprise, not with the factories thousands of kilometers away. Most of the best mechanics were thousands of kilometers away, too, facing the Germans and Poles. The ones stuck in Siberia did what they could with what they had… when they were sober, anyhow.
They weren’t sober often enough to suit Mouradian. If you weren’t a Russian, you almost always thought Russians drank like fish. Stas had grown up with wine. He’d learned to handle vodka. If you were going to deal with Russians, that was self-defense. When Russian officers (to say nothing of Russian enlisted men) weren’t up to anything else, they’d drink, often till they fell over.
He’d seen as much in Europe. Drunkenness was worse here, too. For one thing, drunks were liable to get posted to Siberia so they wouldn’t cause difficulties anywhere that mattered. For another, there was even less to do in Siberia than in European Russia. That was doubly true through the long, dark, cold winters. The more you stayed drunk, the less you brooded on how boring everything else was.
And, as Stas had heard from more Russians than he cared to remember, alcohol was antifreeze. He’d heard it so often, he’d said it himself. That didn’t keep plenty of Russian drunks from freezing to death.
Drunks, of course, also didn’t make the best mechanics. The first glimpse Mouradian got of the SB-2s that flew against the Japanese besieging Vladivostok made him blurt, “This must be your junkyard.”
Captain Boris Novikov looked pained. “No, no, no. These are the runners. You’ll get one of them. You want to see the junkyard, come with me.”
He exhaled fog and vodka fumes. He wasn’t immune to the Russian national voice. He didn’t wobble as he walked, though. Like a lot of his countrymen, he could hold his liquor. Was that national virtue or vice? Mouradian had pondered the question for a long time. Nothing he could do about it now.
He followed Novikov down a path that had probably started as a deer track. It wound through snow-draped pines that looked as if they belonged in a Christmas scene-only Christmastime was months gone. Stas was glad he had a good pair of valenki. The felt boots would keep his feet from freezing even in weather like this. He hoped.
“Don’t worry,” Novikov said brightly. “We haven’t seen a tiger in weeks.”
“I’m so glad,” Mouradian answered. He was unarmed. Novikov had a pistol. Whether he could draw it if he did see a tiger, and whether it would do any good if he could, were questions the Armenian preferred not to contemplate.
His response made Novikov laugh. Stas wasn’t sure why. They’d come more than half a kilometer. If a tiger did bound out and charge them, no one would hear them shriek. The beast could enjoy a leisurely luncheon.
Suddenly, the path opened out into a clearing. Captain Novikov waved a mittened hand. “Now this, Mouradian, this is the fucking junkyard.”
And it was, too. Wrecked planes, bits and pieces of wrecked planes… Stas saw SB-2s, monoplane and biplane Polikarpov fighters, and other aircraft he had trouble naming. Some of the junk was new. Some was ancient and rusty. Some… If that wasn’t a French fighter left over from the last war, Mouradian didn’t know what it would be.