Only a couple of soldiers had got hurt. Neither wound looked serious. And Ivan was sure of one thing: no matter what Stalin had done to these people, now they understood Hitler was no bargain, either. The ones still alive did, anyhow. He wouldn’t fret over the rest.
Chapter 7
Stas Mouradian eased back on the stick, just a little, as the Pe-2’s landing gear touched the ground. The bomber’s nose came up by a corresponding fraction. That made the landing a bit smoother than it might have been otherwise. Beside him in the cockpit, Isa Mogamedov nodded. The copilot and bomb-aimer didn’t like biting his tongue every time he came down any better than anyone else would have.
Riding the brakes hard, Stas steered the Pe-2 to a revetment and then killed the engines. As the props spun their way back into visibility and then stopped, he let out a long sigh. “Another one down,” he said.
“Da.” Mogamedov nodded. “Not too bad this time around.”
“We’ve been through worse,” Mouradian agreed. But that wasn’t the point, or he didn’t think it was. He’d long since lost track of how many missions he’d flown. How many more would he have to tackle?
He didn’t know the answer, not in numbers. Numbers weren’t what counted. He’d keep it up till the war ended or he got killed, whichever came first. And he knew which was more likely to come first. He’d known for a long time. He was living on borrowed time. Well, who in the Soviet Union wasn’t? The thing to remember was, the Germans were stealing sand from the hourglass, too.
He and Mogamedov scrambled out of the cockpit. Sergeant Mechnikov opened the bomb-bay doors and dropped to the ground. That was so far against regulations, there weren’t even any regulations against it. None of the fancy commissars had dreamt a lousy bombardier could imagine such a thing, much less do it. Well, it wasn’t as if Stas hadn’t noticed the commissars’ failures of imagination before.
Noticing was one thing. Letting them notice you’d noticed … That put you into more danger than flying your Pe-2 into all the flak the Wehrmacht owned. You might escape the German guns. The NKVD would get you every goddamn time.
Groundcrew men in greasy coveralls trotted up to drape the bomber in camouflage netting. “How’d it go?” one of them called to Mouradian.
What were you supposed to say to something like that? Stas stayed strictly literal, which seemed safest: “We dropped our load. I think they came down about where we wanted them to. Then we turned around and got the devil out of there. As far as I know, the plane didn’t take any damage.”
“No Messerschmitts this time,” Mogamedov agreed. “The ground fire could have been worse.”
“Well, you like ’em easy once in a while, don’t you?” the groundcrew man said. “We’ll tend to the engines and the guns and the tires, and the armorers will bomb you up for the next run.”
“Khorosho.” Stas left it right there. What could you say but fine? Nothing, not unless you wanted the Chekists to get their hooks into you.
All the same, he and his copilot and his bombardier exchanged a quick glance the groundcrew men wouldn’t see-and wouldn’t understand if they did happen to see it. Easy? Everything was easy after the fact. Going in, your mouth was always dry. You had to clench your asshole tight by main force-same with the sphincter that kept you from pissing yourself.
Because you didn’t, you couldn’t, know ahead of time how things would go. The 109 you imagined was even scarier than any actual Nazi airshark. The flak burst that shook your plane for real went off right in the cockpit in your fears, and those were your guts it splattered over the instruments.
It wasn’t cowardice. It was nothing like cowardice. You went ahead and did your job. But you had to have had your soul surgically removed not to think of all the things the enemy or simple mechanical failure could do to you. A few stolid pilots did seem to have undergone that depsyching. Even among Russians, though, not many men were so nerveless. And, of the ones who were, not many flew.
“I want my hundred grams,” Fyodor Mechnikov declared, in tones that warned somebody would get hurt if the sergeant didn’t get his vodka ration right away.
Most of the time, the way Russians drank appalled Stas. Most of the time, but not always. Right after he came back from a mission, alcoholic oblivion often looked good-better than those imaginary Messerschmitts and the flak burst that could have butchered him, anyhow.
More Pe-2s landed at the airstrip. One by one, they sheltered in revetments and were hidden from above. On a dirt road north of the runway, tanks rumbled west. So did big, square-shouldered American trucks full of big, square-shouldered Red Army men.
Every one of them would get his hundred grams. And then, maybe, they’d link arms, grab their submachine guns, and swarm toward German entrenchments yelling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs. A few lucky ones might get to sober up and try to carry out their superiors’ next brilliant orders.
From everything Stas had seen and heard, the Red Army’s approach to putting out a fire was smothering it with bodies. The trucks kicking up dust on the road argued that they still had plenty of bodies to throw. Whether they could develop a better approach … They were Russians, after all.
He stumped over to the officers’ tent. Sweat sprang out all over him as he walked. In winter, the furs and leather in which he flew also kept him warm on the ground. It wasn’t winter any more. He didn’t quite want to run around naked, but changing into a more comfortable outfit was definitely on the list.
So was vodka. For now, loosening snaps and zippers and shedding his jacket would do. He ducked inside. He wasn’t the first flyer inside, or the first drinker. There were gherkins and slices of sausage to eat with the vodka. Pelmeni-meat-stuffed dumplings-were even better when you were setting out to tie one on, but they also took work to make. Pickles and sausage didn’t.
“To blowing the cocks off the Fascist hyenas!” another pilot said. He raised his glass, then knocked back the shot.
Stas and his comrades followed suit. The vodka snarled down his throat. He felt as if he’d swallowed a lighted spirit lamp, then had a grenade go off in his stomach. “Bozhemoi, that’s good!” the other pilot said. Stas wondered if they were drinking the same stuff. They were.
Isa Mogamedov stuck to tea. He drank sometimes, but not often. He was always sorry afterwards, and not just because vodka seemed to hurt him badly. Maybe he got more from his sins because he regretted them more.
Mouradian ate some sausage. It was the cheap stuff you got in wartime: more fat than meat, and about as much filler as fat. Most of the time, he would have sneered at it. Not today, not when he was going to do some serious drinking. The fat would grease his stomach lining the way oil greased the cylinders in his bomber’s engines. With luck, it would slow down the alcohol soaking into his system. It wouldn’t stop the stuff, but all you could do was all you could do.
Click! Someone turned on the radio, which was hooked up to a truck battery. The set was a standard Soviet receiver, which meant it only brought in frequencies on which the state broadcast. You couldn’t get anyone else’s views even if you were rash and unpatriotic enough to want them. When it came to preserving their own authority, the USSR’s rulers were ruthlessly efficient.
After the set warmed up, syrupy music blared out of it. Stas wasn’t the only flyer who pulled a face. You could get in trouble for showing you didn’t fancy what came out of the radio, but most of the time you wouldn’t. And it was just a few minutes before the top of the hour. The news would start then. The news, of course, came with heavy doses of propaganda, but what could you do? One of the things you could do was gain facility at reading between the lines. That Stas had done.