A split second after that, the whole crowded estaminet went berserk. There were more local tradesmen and farmers than soldiers in the joint, but the soldiers were mostly younger, in better shape, and more practiced at helping one another. They held their own and then some.
Demange didn’t enjoy bar brawls. He didn’t shy away from them, but he would rather have drunk quietly and then picked up a barmaid or gone to the local maison de tolerance. One thing you had to give officers’ brothels: the girls were fresher and prettier than they were at enlisted men’s houses. Less jaded? Well, you couldn’t have everything.
Just because he didn’t enjoy bar brawls didn’t mean he wasn’t sudden incapacitation on two legs when he found himself in one. As far as he was concerned, the Marquis of Queensbury was nothing but some English fairy. The only rule he recognized was to do unto others before they could do unto him.
Furious whistles squealed outside the estaminet. “The flics!” someone yelled needlessly. The cops waded into the fray, which then became that rare and ugly thing, a three-cornered fracas. The flics had truncheons. They were-presumably-sober. But there weren’t enough of them for those advantages to help as much as they’d no doubt hoped.
In short order, some of the soldiers and some of the locals had truncheons, while some of the flics didn’t. A policeman went out through the front window. Since it was covered over with plywood, he probably didn’t much fancy that. Demange didn’t think he would have.
He rabbit-punched somebody on his way to the door. The evening had turned more strenuous than he really cared for. Once he pushed his way out past the blackout curtain, he paused and lit a Gitane. If German night bombers could spot the flare of a match from 6,000 meters, they deserved to score a hit. After he blew out the match, even the cigarette’s coal seemed bright.
He got called on the carpet a couple of days later. He’d expected he would. “That was quite a scrum in the estaminet,” remarked the mustachioed colonel who commanded the regiment.
“Yes, sir,” Demange said woodenly, and not another word.
“The civilians are hopping mad,” the colonel observed. Demange stood mute, at stiff attention. The colonel’s right eyebrow quirked. “You were there, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yes, sir,” Demange repeated, with, again, no more.
“Have any idea what touched off the riot? That’s what it was, or near enough.”
“No, sir.”
“I’ve heard-just heard, mind you-you might have had something to do with it.”
After a few seconds, Demange decided merely standing mute wouldn’t do. He grudged the regimental CO a shrug.
The colonel snorted. “All right. Get the hell out of here. And stay out of trouble for a while, you hear me? If you’d kicked that one bugger any harder, you might have broken his neck, and then I’d have a tougher time sweeping all this merde under the rug.”
With mechanical precision, Demange saluted. He did a smart about-turn and walked out of the colonel’s tent. He didn’t crack a smile till he got outside. It had all gone about the way he’d figured. They wouldn’t do anything to an officer who hadn’t committed murder, not in wartime they wouldn’t. Chuckling, Demange lit a fresh Gitane.
Anastas Mouradian eyed with undisguised admiration the planes that shared the airstrip with his squadron of Pe-2s. He whistled and silently clapped his hands. “Now those babies,” he said, trying to sound slangy in Russian, “those babies mean business.”
“The Stormoviks?” another pilot said. “Bet your dick they do.” Only Russians could bring out mat as if born to it, because they damn well were.
What the Il-2 ground-attack planes really reminded Stas of were Stukas. They weren’t just the same. They didn’t have that vulture-like kink in the wing. They did boast retractable landing gear. They lacked the Stukas’ dive brakes, which let the German aircraft put their bombs right where they wanted them to go. Instead, the Stormoviks carried a cannon and lots of forward-facing machine guns, plus one that the rear gunner used, Stuka-style, to fire at enemies coming up from behind.
Like the Stuka (and like the Pe-2, come to that), the Il-2 looked as if it meant business. Maybe that was the long in-line engine Stormoviks and the German dive-bombers both used. Those gave both airplanes a sharklike profile. But the Ilyushins weren’t purpose-built dive-bombers, though they could carry bombs. Their main mission was to roar along at just above treetop height and shoot anything that moved.
“They did something sneaky with them.” The Russian flyer waved toward the closest Stormovik.
“Ah? Tell me more,” Stas said. The other fellow obviously wanted to do just that.
“You see the rear-firing machine gun?” the other pilot asked.
“Da.” Mouradian nodded.
“Well, what I hear is, when they first started flying against the Fritzes, when the rear gunner got it, he’d slump down onto the breech of the gun, and his weight would make the barrel point straight up. The fucking Germans aren’t dumb, damn them to hell. When they saw that, they knew they could attack from behind without worrying about getting shot at. Cost some of our pilots their necks. Now there’s a gearing mechanism in the gun mount so it won’t tell everybody in sight when the poor asshole in the back seat stops one.”
“How about that?” Stas said, which was a safe thing to come out with almost any old time. The gearing system was clever: coldbloodedly clever. It struck him as a very Russian-or perhaps very Soviet-way to solve the problem. Protect the rear gunner better? That would add weight and degrade performance. But if a Nazi in a Messerschmitt couldn’t be sure the guy was wounded or dead, he might not bore in and shoot down the Il-2.
Yes, clever. Clever in a way that made Mouradian want to shiver. However much he wanted to, he didn’t. The Russian pilot wasn’t a man he knew well. He had no way to be sure the fellow didn’t report to the NKVD. (For that matter, you had no way to be sure your best friend, the guy who’d had your back since you were both four years old, didn’t report to the NKVD. The gulags were full of people whose best friends had sold them down the river. And some of those best friends had ended up in camps themselves. What went around came around, all right.)
“Pilot’s got good armor, though,” the Russian said.
Stas nodded again. The rear gunner might be expendable. the pilot wasn’t. He could bring back a Stormovik with a dead rear gunner … as long as the Fritzes didn’t realize the rear gunner’d bought his plot. Armor for the pilot. A gear mechanism for the gunner. Priorities. Russian priorities. Soviet priorities.
He figured the Il-2 pilots would have high morale. Why not? Their planes were made to chew up Germans, and looked as if they could do what they were made for very well.
How about the rear gunners? How enthusiastic would they be about flying into places where the Luftwaffe was strong? Mouradian snorted softly. If they didn’t like it, some Chekist would give them a bullet in the back of the neck and then go to supper without a backwards glance. You had a chance in a plane, which was more than you could say if you wound up in the infantry and got told to charge that machine-gun emplacement over there.
The Russian figured angles as if he were playing pooclass="underline" “With these cocks flying low and us up high, Fritz’ll have to split his planes in half. That gives us a better chance to come home again, y’know? Anything that does that, I’m all for it.”