“Right.” Marshal Koniev had to fight to swallow laughter. Russian profanity-mat-was almost a language in itself. The driver might have said If they stand there goofing off… Or he might not have. Even generals sometimes felt like using mat.
The road bent sharply. The driver slowed down. Something stirred among the dead trees near the asphalt.
Alarm stirred in Koniev. “Step on it!” he said urgently. If he turned out to have a case of the vapors, the driver could tell everybody he didn’t have any balls. Koniev wouldn’t mind, not one bit.
As the driver’s foot came down on the gas, somebody-a man in a gray greatcoat-stood up. He aimed a sheet-metal tube at the Kubelwagen. “Panzerfaust!” the driver yelped. He grabbed his submachine gun at the same time as Koniev reached for the pistol on his belt.
Too late. Trailing fire, the bazooka-style rocket roared toward the car. Marshal Koniev ducked. That did him exactly no good. The Panzerfaust was made to smash tanks. A soft-skinned vehicle like the Kubelwagen was nothing but fire and scrap metal-and torn, charred flesh-an instant after the rocket struck home.
Faces blank as if they were so many machines, Soviet soldiers led out ten more Germans and tied them to the execution posts. Some were men, some women. All were in the prime of life. Orders from Moscow were that no old people or children be used to avenge Marshal Koniev. For him, the defeated enemy had to give their best.
The Germans had to give, and give, and give. Blood puddled at the bases of those posts. Flies buzzed in the mild spring air. The iron stink of gore made Captain Vladimir Bokov’s nose wrinkle. He turned to the officer commanding the firing squads. “Smells like an outdoor butcher shop.”
“Er-yes.” That officer didn’t seem to know how to respond. He was a Red Army major, so he nominally outranked Bokov. But the arm-of-service color on his shoulder boards was an infantryman’s maroon, and infantry majors were a kopek a kilo.
Bokov’s shoulder boards carried four small stars each, not one large one. His colors, though, were bright blue and crimson. He wore a special badge on his left upper arm: a vertical sword inside a wreath. No wonder a mere infantry major treated him with exaggerated caution-he belonged to the NKVD.
“Well, carry on,” he said.
“Very well, Comrade Captain,” said the infantry officer-his name was Ihor Eshchenko. That and his accent proclaimed him a Ukrainian.
He gestured to the troops tying the hostages to the posts. Make it snappy, the wave said. The men blindfolded the Germans. Eshchenko glanced at Bokov, but the NKVD man didn’t object. Moscow hadn’t said the executioners couldn’t grant that small mercy.
A fresh squad of Red Army soldiers came out to shoot the hostages. The local commanders didn’t make their men kill and kill and kill in cold blood; they rotated the duty whenever they could. One man in each squad had a blank in his weapon, too. If the soldiers wanted to think they weren’t shooting anybody, they could.
“Ready!” Eshchenko called. The soldiers brought up their rifles. “Aim!” he said. A couple of the Germans waiting to die blubbered and moaned. They might not understand Russian, but they knew how firing squads worked. “Fire!” Major Eshchenko shouted.
Mosin-Nagant carbines barked. The Germans slumped against their bonds. Back in pagan days, a chieftain who died took a retinue with him to the next world. Good Marxist-Leninists didn’t believe in the next world. All the same, the principle here wasn’t so different.
Some officers in charge of executions armed their men with submachine guns and let them blast away at full automatic. Major Eshchenko seemed to have too much of a feel for the military proprieties to put up with anything so sloppy. Vladimir Bokov had watched and taken part in plenty of executions, and this one was as neat as any.
One drawback to using rifles, though: two or three hostages weren’t killed outright. Eshchenko drew his pistol and gave each the coup de grace with a bullet at the nape of the neck.
Stone-faced Germans carried away the corpses. Once Germans were dead, the Red Army stopped caring about them. “Nicely done, Major,” Bokov said as Eshchenko came back. “Cigarette?”
“Spasibo,” Eshchenko replied, accepting one. He leaned forward to let Bokov give him a light. After taking a drag, he added, “This American tobacco is so mild, it’s hardly there at all.”
“I know.” Bokov nodded. “Better than going without, though.”
“Oh, you’d better believe it.” The infantry officer inhaled again. He blew out a perfect smoke ring-Bokov was jealous-and said, “Better than the horrible crap we smoked at the start of the war, too.”
Bokov sent him a hooded look. Though the NKVD man’s eyes were blue, they were narrow like an Asiatic’s: good for not showing what he was thinking. All he said was “Da.” Tobacco was wretched after the German invasion because the Nazis overran so much fine cropland. A vindictive man-or even a man with a quota to fill-might construe Eshchenko’s remark as criticism of Comrade Stalin. A word from Bokov, and the major would find out more than he ever wanted to know about Soviet camps.
But Bokov had other things on his mind today. As if picking that from his thoughts, Major Eshchenko said, “Naturally, we also seized prisoners for interrogation. We’ve already, ah, questioned several of them. The rest we saved for you.”
Questioned, of course, was a euphemism for worked over. Well, a marshal was dead. You couldn’t expect the Red Army to stay gentle after that. And the GRU, the military intelligence unit, thought it knew as many tricks as the NKVD. The two services were often rivals. Not here, though. “Any real leads?” Captain Bokov asked.
Eshchenko shrugged. “None I’ve heard about. But I might not.”
Bokov nodded. If the infantry officer didn’t need to know something, nobody would tell him. That was basic doctrine. The NKVD man asked, “So where are these prisoners?”
“Over there, in that cow barn.” Eshchenko pointed to a big wooden building surrounded by shiny new barbed wire and a couple of squads’ worth of Soviet guards. The major snorted. “Damned thing is fancier than we’d use for people, fuck your mother if it’s not.”
He was taking a chance, talking like that. What he wanted to say was, I’m a regular guy, and I figure you are, too. But if Bokov decided he meant the insult personally, he was dead meat. Again, Bokov had bigger worries than a major with a loose tongue. All he said was, “I’ll see what I can get out of them.”
His blue and crimson arm-of-service colors got him past the junior lieutenant in charge of the guards. The lieutenant did give him a couple of men with submachine guns, saying, “My orders are not to let anybody go in amongst the Nazis by himself.”
The kid spoke of them as if they were lions or bears. His orders made sense, too. If the Germans took a hostage…Well, it wouldn’t do them any good, but they might be too stupid to realize that. And Bokov was sure the Soviets would deal with the hostage-takers without caring what happened to the man they held.
One of the soldiers opened the barred door. The stink that wafted out said the barn didn’t have much in the way of plumbing. Most likely, it didn’t have anything. “Give the swine the works,” the trooper said.
“I aim to, Corporal,” Bokov said. Then he switched to German and shouted, “Prisoners, attention!” He’d learned the language before the war started. Only luck, he supposed, that that hadn’t made someone suspect him.
How the Germans scrambled to form neat lines! They all wore uniform, and ranged in age from maybe fourteen to sixty-five. Bokov found himself nodding. Whoever’d taken out Marshal Koniev had used a military weapon, and used it like someone who knew how. So the occupying troops would have hauled in as many men in field-gray as they could catch.