That was interesting. Mogamedov might not be a pious Muslim-you couldn’t very well be a pious anything and a New Soviet Man at the same time-but he didn’t go out of the way to flout the tenets of his ancestral faith.
If I want to, chances are I can use that against him, Stas thought. All he had to do was whisper in an informer’s ear, and Mogamedov would find Chekists crawling over him like lice. And all Stas had to do after that was look at himself in the mirror for the rest of his life.
One of his bristly eyebrows quirked. If only he didn’t despise people who did such things. But he did. He knew exactly what he thought of people who sold out their friends and neighbors and acquaintances so they could move up themselves. No Russian, not even the filthiest mat, could describe the blackness of such treachery. For that, you needed Armenian.
Proof of how strongly he felt about it was that he wouldn’t give an Azeri to the KGB. If Mogamedov did himself in by avoiding pork and alcohol, then he did. Stas wouldn’t be especially sorry. But he wouldn’t grease the skids-even with lard.
That thought, perhaps aided by the vodka he’d knocked back, made him chuckle to himself. Isa Mogamedov noticed. Unlike most of the men eating breakfast, he wasn’t drinking part of it, so he noticed things they might have missed. “What’s funny, Comrade Pilot?”
“I was just remembering a joke somebody told me,” Mouradian answered-a lie, but a polite lie.
But the Russian sitting next to him gave him a nudge and said, “Well, tell it, then. I could use a laugh.” By his slurred speech, he’d drunk more of his breakfast than Stas had.
Mouradian couldn’t even shoot him a resentful look. Mogamedov might notice that, too. Instead, he really had to remember a joke, and he had to come out with it. He chose a long, complicated story about a pretty girl in Moscow who wanted to record a message for her grandmother in far-off Irkutsk but couldn’t afford it, and about the lecherous fellow who ran the recording shop and saw a chance to take it out in trade. “So there she is, on her knees in front of him, holding it”-Stas illustrated with appropriate lewd gestures-“and he says, ‘Well? Go ahead!’ And she leans forward, and she says, ‘Hello? Granny?’ ”
The Russian officer bellowed laughter. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. “That’s good! Bozhemoi, that’s good!” he spluttered, and laughed some more.
Mogamedov laughed, too, even if not quite so much. Everybody who’d listened laughed. You couldn’t hear that joke without laughing-at least, Stas had never run into anybody who could.
Another vodka bottle came around. He swigged from it. No, vodka wasn’t against his religion, even if he’d drunk wine more often before the Red Air Force pulled him out of Armenia. Wine tasted good, too. As far as he could see, vodka had only one purpose: knocking you on your ass. The stuff was damn good at it, too. He offered the bottle to the Russian who’d made him come up with the joke.
That worthy poured it down as if he never expected to see any more. He almost emptied the bottle. The guy beside him did kill it. Others were going round, though. Before long, one got to Isa Mogamedov. Polite as a cat, he passed it on. “More for the rest of us!” said the Russian he gave it to. That got almost as big a laugh as Stas’ joke.
Theo Hossbach was a curiosity in the Wehrmacht: a panzer radioman who didn’t like to talk. He doled out words as if somebody were charging him a half a Reichsmark for each and every one. The radioman in a Panzer III sat next to the driver, and also handled the bow machine gun. Theo’d liked his place in the old Panzer II better. He’d been in back of the turret, and most of the time nobody bothered him at all.
Only one problem there: the Panzer II was well on the way from obsolescent to obsolete. Its armor was useless against anything more than small-arms fire, while its 20mm main armament could pop away from now till doomsday without doing anything a KV-1 or a T-34 would notice. Panzer IIs soldiered on in the east. They still made decent reconnaissance vehicles-they could go places armored cars couldn’t-but they weren’t fighting panzers any more.
For that matter, a Panzer III’s 37mm gun was only a door-knocker against a KV-1’s or a T-34’s front armor. It did have a chance of punching through their steel sides or into the engine. But German panzers were badly outgunned these days.
In weather like this, just getting German panzers to run was an adventure. The winter before, the Panzertruppen had often kept fires going through the night under their machines’ engine compartments so they’d start up in the morning. The extra-strength antifreeze and winter lubricants were better this year. All the same, everybody who wore the black coveralls and death’s-head panzer emblem envied the T-34’s diesel motor. It seemed immune to cold and snow and ice.
Somewhere up ahead lay victory, if they could find it. Across the radio set from Theo, Adi Stoss grinned cynically. “Next stop Smolensk, right?” the driver said.
“Right,” Theo said: fifty pfennigs expended. Adi’s grin got wider, but no less cynical. The summer’s campaign had been aimed at Smolensk, the great fortress on the road to Moscow. It wasn’t summer any more. It wasn’t 1941 any more, either. Smolensk was still in Russian hands.
The Panzer III clattered across the snowy landscape. Ostketten-wide tracks made for the mud and snow in these parts-helped it keep going. Even with Ostketten, it couldn’t match a T-34’s cross-country performance.
Other panzers advanced alongside Theo’s. Landsers accompanied them on foot and in armored personnel carriers. Those were nice machines. They took infantry to where it needed to fight and kept it from getting killed on the way … unless, of course, something really nasty happened, which it always could. The personnel carriers also let infantry keep up with the panzers, always a problem. They would have done even better had the Reich had more of them.
Everything would have been better had the Reich had more of it. Sitting up here, Theo could see out. He missed his iron nest in the Panzer II. Seeing out, he was forcibly reminded how vast this country was. It made even the Wehrmacht seem undersized and overstretched. You overran villages and towns. You shelled and machine-gunned the Ivans who tried to stop you. You went on. And what lay ahead? Always more villages and towns. Always more Ivans, too.
Somewhere up ahead here-probably not very far up ahead, either-more Russians waited. Theo cherished every moment of peace and relative quiet. He knew how precious such moments were.
Hermann Witt’s voice came out of the speaking tube from the turret: “Panzer halt!”
“Halting,” Adi said, and hit the brakes. “What’s up?” he added. “I don’t see anything.”
Peering through his vision slits, Theo didn’t see anything, either. It didn’t prove much, not when he had little chance of seeing things while restricted by the slits. Like any good panzer commander, Sergeant Witt rode with head and shoulders out of the turret when bullets weren’t flying, and sometimes even when they were. Somebody in the panzer needed a good view of the wider world.
“I’m not quite sure,” Witt answered. “But take a look over about two o’clock. Something’s not right there.” As if to underscore the words, he traversed the turret, presumably toward two o’clock. Through the rumble of the idling engine, Theo heard him tell Lothar Eckhardt, “Give it a round of HE there.”
Theo still didn’t see anything funny. “One round of HE,” the gunner agreed. The main armament bellowed. Inside the panzer, the noise wasn’t too bad. The cartridge case clattered down onto the bottom of the fighting compartment. The harsh, familiar stink of smokeless powder made Theo cough.