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Either way, he settled down not far from where he’d sat before and went back to the novel. When things were quiet, you savored the moment. Looking back, he’d done more sitting around and waiting than fighting. That might be true, but when he did look back he knew he would remember the moments of terror and the even rarer moments of exaltation far better than he recalled the longer boring stretches.

When he looked back. If he looked back. If he lived to look back. He’d been in the war a long time, and he hadn’t once got badly hurt. That made him even luckier than a guy who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. The gambler only won money and all the fine cars and champagne and loose, beautiful women it could buy. Chaim won the precious chance to be that guy.

If he stayed long enough, he’d catch it as surely as Robert Jordan was going to in the story. A shell would come down in the wrong place or he’d make the unwanted acquaintance of a machine-gun bullet or some Fascist would smash in his skull with an entrenching tool in a raid. In the long run, the house always won.

They’d been on the point of demobilizing the Internationals when the big European war blew up. That would have been his chance to leave with his honor still in one piece. But it hadn’t happened. He was still here-and still reading.

Robert Jordan blew the bridge. The Republic fucked up the attack he was supposed to blow the bridge for. Sure as hell, he got it. And so did the one halfway decent Nationalist Hemingway stuck in the book. War sucked, all right. Hemingway might be a drunken blowhard, but he sure as hell knew that.

Colonel Steinbrenner stood under the broad Russian sky, looking at the assembled pilots and radiomen and groundcrew personnel in their black coveralls. He’d climbed up onto a ration crate so they could all see him, too: not much of a podium, but it was what he had.

Hans-Ulrich had elbowed his way up toward the front of the squadron. He wanted to hear what the CO had to say. The cynical part of him that had sprung up during the war wondered why. He’d get the same orders no matter what Steinbrenner said now. But, cynical part or not, here he stood. Like Luther, he could do nothing else.

Steinbrenner raised both hands, almost like a minister offering benediction. The Luftwaffe men in front of him quieted down. A couple of guys who didn’t quiet down fast enough to suit their comrades got elbows in the ribs to encourage them

“Well, boys, it’s finally gone and happened,” Steinbrenner said. “We are being recalled to the West.”

A buzz ran through the flyers and groundcrew men. Rage and disappointment warred within Hans-Ulrich: rage that betrayal from England and France was forcing the Reich to shift the squadron away from the vital war against Bolshevism, disappointment that his affair with Sofia was being forcibly ended.

“When they told me they were transferring us, they warned me, ‘You’d best be careful in the West-you’ll be going up against the hottest new RAF Spitfires and French Dewoitines,’ ” Steinbrenner went on. He raised one eyebrow till it almost disappeared under the patent-leather brim of his officer’s cap. “And I looked at them, and I said, ‘Ja? Und so?’

The squadron exploded into laughter. Hans-Ulrich barked as loud as anyone else. Yes, modern RAF and Armee de l’Air fighters could hack Stukas out of the sky with the greatest of ease. But so could the biplane Po-153s the Red Air Force was still flying. The Ju-87 was not made to dogfight, or even to run away. You had to be an optimist to use it where you didn’t have unchallenged air superiority.

Which meant somebody in the Luftwaffe high command probably was an optimist. There wouldn’t be unchallenged air superiority in the West. The comment Colonel Steinbrenner had got from his superiors made that only too plain. Hans-Ulrich had been shot down once in the West and once here in the East. He and Sergeant Dieselhorst had managed to bail out both times. He supposed they might stay lucky once or twice more.

He also had the feeling they would need to. If they went hunting panzers in France, the gun pods would make their plane even less airworthy than it was without them. Maybe he could surprise enemy fighters with the 37mm guns. Any cannon that would do for a panzer would do for a Spitfire … if you could hit it. He’d knocked down a couple of enemy planes with the big guns. Again, he supposed he might stay lucky.

Or he might not. And if he didn’t, his story wouldn’t have the kind of ending a cinema audience liked.

“We fly west day after tomorrow,” Steinbrenner said. “Our new base will be in Belgium, not far from the French border. Groundcrew men will come by rail-we won’t mount you on the wings and drop you over the new airstrip.”

He got another laugh, this one mostly from the men in the black coveralls. Hans-Ulrich envied his ease up there in front of everybody. The pilot wished he could match it himself. He knew he had a long way to go.

When he and Albert Dieselhorst climbed into their Stuka for the journey into the wild, exotic, and almost forgotten West, Dieselhorst said, “Well, I won’t be sorry to get the hell out of Russia, and you can take that to the bank.”

“Neither will I,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. The next German he met who admitted being sorry to leave Russia would be the first. But he couldn’t help adding, “The Reich isn’t leaving. We’ve still got a lot of men here on the ground.”

“Some of them will head west, too,” Dieselhorst said. “If the froggies and the Tommies are serious, we sure don’t have enough troops there now to do more than annoy them.”

“Two-front war,” Rudel said gloomily. “Damn the Englishmen! It’s their fault.”

“It sure is.” Sergeant Dieselhorst chuckled, almost too low for Rudel to hear him. Hans-Ulrich didn’t swear very often. Maybe that meant he got more mileage out of the cussing he did use. Maybe it just meant he was a prig.

Bf-109s flew top cover as the Stukas buzzed back toward Byelorussia. If the Ivans had somehow heard the squadron was pulling back, it would be just like them to try to ambush it. But the planes escaped without harm, and came down somewhere not far outside of Minsk.

The Germans were putting their mark on occupied Byelorussia. White signs with black letters from an alphabet a man could read marked the airstrip and the roads around it. Opel trucks-gasoline tankers-rattled up to refuel the dive-bombers. Then the Stukas flew off again, their next stop not far from Bialystok.

Hans-Ulrich thought about asking for a little leave to give Sofia a proper good-bye. If she weren’t a Mischling, he thought he would have done it. After all, the worst Colonel Steinbrenner could tell him was no. But in this time of trouble for Germany, he didn’t want even the tolerant colonel noting how attached he’d got to a half-Jew. Sometimes the best thing you could do was keep your big yap shut.

Before the flight crews climbed back into their Ju-87s for the journey across the rest of Poland and back into the Vaterland, Sergeant Dieselhorst set a hand on Hans-Ulrich’s shoulder for a moment. “Every so often, life can be a real bastard, you know?” he said, rough sympathy in his voice.

Ja,” Hans-Ulrich replied, and not another word. Whether or not Colonel Steinbrenner knew how he felt, his rear gunner sure did. Well, Dieselhorst wouldn’t blab. Hans-Ulrich was sure of that.

Their next stop was in Breslau, not far from where Hans-Ulrich had grown up. Signs at the airport were in German. Some smiling young women from a relief agency brought the Luftwaffe men sweets and something they called tea. What leaves or roots they’d brewed it from, Hans-Ulrich had no idea. It tasted like something halfway between licorice and cough medicine. But it was hot, and they were pleasant, and they had accents like his. He didn’t have to stop and puzzle out what they were saying, the way he’d so often needed to with Sofia.