The flyers nodded. Hans-Ulrich noticed that the wing commander didn’t say anything about not letting the Fuhrer down. He didn’t make a fuss about it, but he noticed. How could you help noticing such things when everybody’d got so maniacal about security and loyalty these days? Yes, the powers that be thought Steinbrenner was all right. He wouldn’t have replaced Colonel Greim if they hadn’t. But you never could tell whether they’d change their minds.
“Questions?” Steinbrenner asked after he finished the briefing. One of the other pilots stuck up his hand. The colonel nodded. “What is it, Franz?”
“Borisov is in Russia, nicht wahr?” Franz Fischbach said.
“In Byelorussia, actually. But yes, inside the Soviet Union, if that’s what you meant,” Steinbrenner answered. “The gloves are off. I’ll say that again, to make sure you get it. The gloves are off. The Reds have been bombing us whenever they found the nerve. Now we get to show them what they bought. Don’t you like it? If you don’t, I’ll find somebody else to go instead.”
“Oh, no, sir. Don’t worry about me,” Fischbach said quickly. Any other reply and he could have kissed his flying career good-bye. “I just wanted to make sure the brass bothered to check the map.”
That got a chuckle from the wing commander. “Yeah, you never can tell with the fellows with the fancy shoulder straps… Other questions?” He looked surprised when he got one. “What’s on your mind, Peter?”
“Are we knocking the Reds around to help persuade England and France to throw in with us?” Peter Tannenwald inquired. “That’s what you hear everywhere.”
“I’ve heard it, too. I don’t know if it’s true or not,” Colonel Steinbrenner said. Hans-Ulrich had also heard it. He hoped it was true. It would make life easier. Steinbrenner went on, “You’d do better asking somebody from the Foreign Ministry, not me.”
“Oh, sure, sir.” Tannenwald grinned at him. “Only you’re right here, and those clowns are back in Berlin.”
“That’s true, but they know the answer, and I just wish I did. All I know is, you’ve got to go get that bridge,” Steinbrenner said. “Good luck to you all. I hope to see every one of you back here before very long.”
Hans-Ulrich hoped that would happen, too. The Germans and Poles had just about cleared the Red Army out of Poland. They’d pushed into the northern Ukraine from southeastern Poland. The Pripet Marshes, which lay on the Polish-Byelorussian border, slowed their advance in that part of the front. No German panzers were anywhere near Borisov, not so far as Hans-Ulrich knew.
Franz Fischbach summed up what that meant: “We don’t want to get shot down behind the Russian lines, you’re saying.”
“Not unless you’ve got a big insurance policy and you need your next of kin to cash it in right now,” Steinbrenner agreed dryly. By all the signs, the Russians cared little for the Geneva Convention. They hadn’t signed it. That meant the Germans didn’t need to follow its rules when dealing with Red prisoners. But it also meant the Russians did as they pleased with Germans they captured. You heard stories about foot soldiers ingeniously mutilated, maybe after they were dead, but maybe not, too. Some pilots made sure they always kept a round in their pistol, to keep the Russians from having fun with them if their luck soured. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t worried about such things before. Flying against Borisov… I’d better see to it, he thought.
After the meeting broke up, Sergeant Dieselhorst asked him about what was going on. Hans-Ulrich explained the mission. Dieselhorst nodded impatiently. “Ja, ja,” he said. “But what about the Western powers? Are they going to come to their senses, or will they go on fighting us instead?”
“Peter asked Colonel Steinbrenner the same thing.”
“And…?”
“And the colonel said he should talk to the fellows in striped trousers, ’cause they might know and he didn’t.”
Dieselhorst snorted. “Those fairies don’t know their ass from their elbow. Sure would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to worry about the Western front.”
“You’re right. It would. But the colonel can’t do anything about that, and neither can we. All we can do is bomb the snot out of the Ivans, so we will.”
“Sounds good by me.” The sergeant sent him a crooked grin. “And then you can try and get back to Bialystok and see your half-Jewish girlfriend.”
Rudel’s ears heated. “Sofia’s not my girlfriend.” That was true, although not from lack of effort on his part. “I don’t know what kind of Mischling she is.” That was also true. She was maddeningly vague about herself. She might have been almost a full-blooded Jew. Or she might just have been an uncommonly swarthy Pole. In these parts, half the time nobody was sure what anybody else was.
Flying the mission seemed easier than facing Sofia, anyhow. The Russians could only kill him in the air or torture him and then kill him if they caught him on the ground. They couldn’t humiliate him, make him feel he was twelve years old again, and at the same time make him feel more electrically alive, more sparky and sparkly, than he’d ever felt before.
As soon as his Stuka crossed over into territory the Reds still held, they started shooting at him. They opened up with everything they had: not only antiaircraft guns but also machine guns and rifles. That small-arms fire would fall far short of the plane. All they were doing with it was putting themselves in danger. A bullet falling from a couple of thousand meters could kill you if it landed on your unprotected head. The Germans wasted much less ammo like that: not none, but much less.
He droned along behind and to the left of Peter Tannenbaum’s plane, the flight leader. If Peter didn’t know the way to Borisov, they were all shafted. Hans-Ulrich kept an eye peeled for Soviet fighters. Messerschmitt pilots scorned the biplanes and flat-nosed monoplanes the Red Air Force threw against them. But a fighter all but helpless against a 109 could hack a Stuka out of the sky with the greatest of ease.
“See anything, Albert?” Rudel asked through the speaking tube.
“Only the rest of our boys,” Dieselhorst answered. “I wish they’d given me two heavy machine guns back here instead of one ordinary piece. Then I’d really stand a chance against whatever came after us.”
Roughened by static, Tannenbaum’s voice came through Hans-Ulrich’s earphones: “I see the target ahead at one o’clock. Everybody have it?”
That ribbon of water through the flat landscape had to be the Dnieper. And those steel curves marked the bridge. It looked as graceful as most in Germany. Given Russian slovenliness, that surprised Rudel. It was so all the same. “Got it,” he said, his confirmation intermingled with the others.
One by one, the Stukas flipped a wing in the air and dove on the target. The Ivans knew how important the bridge was. Their flak sent up puffs of black smoke all around the bombers. Most of the shells burst behind them. Gunners often underestimated how fast a diving Stuka could go. But Franz Fischbach shouted in pain and despair and fear. His Ju-87 plunged faster than any of the others, and didn’t pull up. An enormous explosion and a pillar of black smoke marked where it slammed into the ground.
Hans-Ulrich released his bombs and hauled back on the stick for all he was worth. The climb was the real danger point, not the dive. The Stuka wasn’t very high, and it moved slower and slower as it shed the momentum it had.
“Somebody got the bridge,” the backwards-facing Sergeant Dieselhorst reported.
“Good,” Rudel answered. “I hate it when our men go down.” Another flyer would have talked of friends going down. Hans-Ulrich had precious few friends in the Luftwaffe. The other pilots had come to respect his skill and courage. Like him? That seemed to be asking too much. But he had more urgent things to worry about, starting with staying alive.
And, with the bridge down, maybe he could ask Colonel Steinbrenner for a short furlough in Bialystok. He wasn’t sure Sofia liked him, either. Whether she did or not felt at least as important as whether he kept on breathing. Why not? If Sofia liked him, he’d have something to go on breathing for.