It wasn’t in the air. The weather stayed colder than any Frenchman who hadn’t been born in a deep freeze would have believed possible. Blizzards roared down from the North Pole one after another. Snow swirled through the air, thicker than tobacco smoke in an estaminet.
The French pissed and moaned about it. The stolid Russians clumped through it. Their valenki kept their feet from freezing. Their greatcoats, unlike Western European models, were made to withstand Arctic cold. They wore fur hats with flaps they could lower and tie to keep their ears from going solid and breaking off. And they figured large doses of vodka made the best antifreeze.
Not even their stolidity, though, could keep the sun from moving farther north in the sky every day. Daylight had been almost nonexistent when Demange got to Murmansk. He liked that fine. Darkness was the best time to get through the Barents Sea without being spotted by German submarines or bombers based in northern Norway.
But his regiment was somewhere down in the queue. The Russians were even more fanatical about queuing than the English were, and that said a mouthful. They were less efficient about it, though. And they didn’t have enough freighters in Murmansk to deal with the influx of French soldiers.
For the life of him, Demange couldn’t see why they didn’t. They were good proletarians, so maybe their diplomats didn’t wear pinstriped trousers the way French officials did. No matter what they wore, they must have spent a lot of time talking the French into climbing out of Hitler’s bed and coming back to Stalin’s. If they wanted French troops out of their country so badly, why in blazes didn’t they have ships waiting to take them away?
Because they were Russians. That was the only answer Demange could see. They spewed propaganda about the dictatorship of the proletariat and about the glories of centralized planning. When the Germans made noises about planning, they meant them. The Ivans? They were like a chorus of whores singing the praises of virginity.
It would have been funny if it hadn’t stood a decent chance of getting Demange killed. Once the equinox passed, days in these latitudes stretched like a politician’s conscience. Murmansk went from having no daylight to speak of to having too bloody much in what seemed like nothing flat.
Demange shepherded his company aboard a rusty scow through more snow flurries. But it was going on nine o’clock at night when he did it, and he had no trouble seeing the falling snow. “Come on, my dears,” he growled. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
“Don’t you want to get home, Lieutenant?” one of his men asked as they stumped up the gangplank.
Demange still couldn’t get used to being called Lieutenant. He’d spent too many happy years as a sergeant despising junior officers. Now he’d turned into what he’d scorned for so long.
To make matters worse, he’d run out of Gitanes. He was reduced to smoking Russian papirosi: a little bit of tobacco at the end of a long paper holder. Russian tobacco tasted funny, and the holder felt wrong in his mouth. All that left him even more short-tempered than usual. “Jules, I want to get home alive,” he answered. “And we’d’ve had a hell of a lot better chance sailing out of here three weeks ago.”
Jules opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. That was the smartest thing he could have done.
The freighter wallowed away from the pier. It took its place in a convoy. Royal Navy destroyers and corvettes served as escort vessels. Seeing them cheered Demange up-a little. On the water, the English had some idea of what they were doing. He certainly preferred them as escorts to ships from the Red Fleet. At least he could be pretty sure their skippers weren’t blind drunk.
Out into the Barents the convoy went. It zigzagged till night finally fell. As soon as darkness descended, all the ships hightailed it west at the best speed of the slowest freighter. Demange would have been content to leave that sorry con behind to shift for itself … unless, of course, it happened to be the miserable tub that was carrying him.
In these latitudes and at this season, daybreak came all too soon. The ships stopped hightailing and started sedately zigzagging once more. Demange peered out at the gray-green water. He’d yell if he saw a periscope-which would probably help just enough to let him go down yelling.
He saw nothing but ocean and a few scudding seabirds. No Flying Pencils or broad-winged Heinkels droned overhead to bomb the convoy. No Stukas roared down on the ships with sirens screaming like the end of the world.
A few days later, he did see something he’d never seen before: a coastline that a sailor told him belonged to Scotland. He’d fought alongside Tommies in two wars, but that was his first glimpse of the British Isles. It made him think he likely would make it back to France. And the Germans, having missed this fine chance to kill him, would get more shots at it.
Chapter 5
Hans-Ulrich Rudel lay beside Sofia in the narrow bed in her cramped little flat in Bialystok. “I don’t know how often I’ll be able to come back,” he said sorrowfully, running his hand along the velvety skin of her flank. “Rumor is, they’re going to send us to the West again.”
If his half-Jewish mistress was spying for the Russians, he’d just handed her enough to get himself shot at sunrise. “That’s a shame,” she said, with an exquisite shrug. “I’ll miss you-some.” Like a scorpion, she always had a sting in her tail.
“I’ll miss you a lot,” Hans-Ulrich said. “I love you, you know.”
“You think you do,” Sofia answered. “But that’s only because I let you get lucky. You’ll get over it as soon as you find somebody else.”
He shook his head and kissed his way down from under her chin to the tip of her left breast. She arched her back and purred. “It’s not like that. You know it isn’t,” he insisted between kisses. “If things were different …”
“If things were different-if I lived in Byelorussia, say, instead of Poland-you would have dropped bombs on my head instead of trying to pick me up.” As usual, Sofia reveled in being difficult. “And if you didn’t blow me up for being a Communist, you would have shot me for being a Jew.”
“I never shot anybody for being a Jew,” Rudel said, which was technically true but made him out to be less of a good National Socialist than he was. “If things were different …”
She interrupted him again. This time, she didn’t use any words, which didn’t mean she was ineffective. As Hans-Ulrich had discovered before, the difference between being blown and blown up was altogether delightful. “My God!” he gasped when she finished. “I don’t think I can see any more.”
“Oh, no?” she retorted. “Then how come you were watching?”
“A blind man would watch when you did that,” he said. “Himmeldonnerwetter, a dead man would.”
“I’ve got a picture of that,” Sofia said, mocking him the way she so often did.
“When we go-if you go-I’ll miss you more than I know how to tell you,” Hans-Ulrich said once more. “You’re wonderful. I’ve never known anybody like you.”
“You should have started fooling around with Mischlings sooner, then.” No, Sofia couldn’t quit jabbing, even when she was way ahead on points.
“I don’t care what you are. I care who you are.” While Rudel said it, it was true.
By the way Sofia’s eyebrow quirked, she understood that better than he did. “Well, it’s a story,” she replied after a brief pause. Then she squeaked, but not in anger, because Hans-Ulrich was doing unto her as he’d been done by. She seemed to enjoy it quite as much as he had. When he finished, she nodded lazily and said, “I will miss you-some.”