“Me, too.” Mouradian nodded one more time. Even in the Soviet Union, you were allowed to want to live. You weren’t always actually allowed to live: if the Germans didn’t do for you, the regime very well might. But it didn’t begrudge your wanting to. Such generosity! A lesser country would be incapable of it.
Thus encouraged, Stas listened to Lieutenant Colonel Tomashevsky’s next mission briefing with more than a little detachment. Tomashevsky was anything but detached. “The strategic situation is starting to look up,” he declared. “The war in the West is on again. It’s not boiling yet, but it’s on. The Fascist hyenas have to split their forces. They can’t concentrate on us the way they could before. But we can concentrate on them. We can, and we will. We’ll show them what they get for messing with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union!”
When the other pilots whooped and cheered, Stas did the same. His heart might not have been in it, but informers couldn’t read his heart. They had to content themselves with his actions. So long as he was seen to be conspicuously loyal, he couldn’t get in too much trouble … unless, of course, he did. Sometimes, like unexpected bad weather, bad things just happened.
The squadron would be supporting an armored column that was counterattacking against the latest German push toward Smolensk. That the Red Army could counterattack during the summer rather than merely defending showed how Stavka was learning its trade in the harsh school of war. As Tomashevsky had said, it also showed how the Nazis were fighting a two-front war again.
Stalin was not a lovable man or a reliable ruler. Stas knew that, and knew where he’d wind up if he were ever foolish enough to show what he knew. All of Western Europe’s bourgeoisie and upper classes hated and feared Communism. Yet Hitler hadn’t been able to keep England and France on his side against the USSR. They’d looked at Stalin, they’d looked at him-and, despite going over to him for a while, they hadn’t been able to stomach him in the end. Stalin seemed better to them.
And if that wasn’t a suitable measure of Hitler’s damnation, Mouradian couldn’t imagine what would be.
People who hadn’t flown talked about looking down on the chessboard of war. As usual, people who hadn’t done something but talked about it anyway didn’t know what they were talking about. The whole point to chess was being able to know all the rules and see everything on the board.
This wasn’t like that. The opposing sides didn’t take turns. They didn’t follow any real rules, either. They hid whatever they could wherever they could hide it. They bushwhacked. And they made mistakes that would have been impossible on the gameboard. A white pawn couldn’t take a white knight. But it would be all too easy for the Pe-2s to drop their bombs on their own tanks instead of on German machines. Stas hoped he’d never done anything like that. He hoped he hadn’t, but he wasn’t sure.
Football had its own goals. And everything on the pitch happened at once. So that came closer. But your foes in a football match weren’t trying to kill you. Somebody’d told Stas that the Japanese played a variant of chess where you could use captured pieces against the fellow who’d once owned them. That fit reality all too well.
He ordered Isa Mogamedov to drop the plane’s bombs when the squadron commander declared that they were over the Fritzes’ lines. He had to believe Tomashevsky knew what he was talking about. All those explosives coming down on the Germans’ heads would make them very unhappy-which was the point of the exercise, if it had any point at all.
The other point was going back and landing without getting shot down or crashing. Along with bombing your friends, you could kill yourself playing the game of war. Several men Stas had known had done just that. Then the game ground on without you. It didn’t care. You’d better.
A Russian bomb went off much too close to Theo Hossbach’s Panzer III. The ugly steel machine shuddered. Fragments of bomb casing clattered off the armored sides. A direct hit from a 250kg bomb, or whatever that bastard had been, and you were dead. The Krupp works didn’t make enough armor to withstand the force of a direct hit.
On the far side of Theo’s radio set, Adi Stoss grinned toothily. “Boy, that was fun!” he said, for all the world as if he meant it.
Theo couldn’t let that go unchallenged, even if rising to it meant spending a couple of words. “Well,” he said, “no.”
Adi’s grin only got wider. He’d made Theo talk. Making him talk, or trying to, was sport for all his crewmates. Adi put his mouth to the speaking tube that led back to the turret. “Two!” he announced, triumph in his voice.
“Lucky,” Hermann Witt came back. “Hell, we’re all lucky that one didn’t land right on top of us.”
That meshed too well with what Theo’d thought right after the bomb burst. But the Panzer III was a tough beast. What didn’t kill it might not make it stronger-Nietzsche’s famous ideal-but usually wouldn’t harm it much. The Ivans were fighting back harder than usual, but summer was Germany’s time in the East.
So Theo thought, anyhow, till the panzer closest to his blew up. That wasn’t a bomb hit-it was a round from a T-34 or a KV-1. The murdered machine was one of the new Panzer III Specials, too. It had a long-barreled 50mm gun that gave it at least a chance of piercing a T-34’s frontal armor. But nobody had a chance if the other guy’s first shot hit.
Theo peered out through his vision slit. Was that T-34 drawing a bead on his panzer now? “Jink, Adi!” Sergeant Witt yelled.
Jink the driver did. He threw the Panzer III this way and that as if he were racing a Bugatti at Monte Carlo. Theo grabbed on to anything he could to keep from getting pitched out of his seat. The inside of the panzer was full of sharp, hard steel edges and projecting pieces of ironmongery. Whoever’d designed it must have assumed the crew would have a smooth, easy ride all the time. He’d been a cockeyed optimist, in other words.
Witt fired the main armament: once, twice. Firing on the move was a mug’s game. You had about as much chance of hitting your target as you did if you spat at it. The 37mm gun wasn’t stabilized. Your rounds might go anywhere, and probably would-not where you wanted them to go, though. Witt was a thoroughly capable, highly experienced panzer commander. So what the hell was he doing?
“Jink right, Adi, and then halt!” he ordered now.
The panzer swung in the direction he wanted. As soon as it had halted, Theo saw a T-34 not nearly far enough away. Its turret traversed toward the Panzer III. The gun on that turret looked big as death-which, for all practical purposes, it was.
But Hermann Witt already had his gun pointing the way he wanted it to. Two armor-piercing rounds slammed into the T-34, one right after the other. Had they hit the thick, cleverly sloped frontal plate, they would have bounced off like rubber balls-Theo’d seen that only too often. Instead, they slammed into the side plate, just above the road wheels. The armor there was thinner and more nearly vertical. Both rounds holed it.
Smoke and flame burst from the T-34’s hatches. Everyone in the Panzer III-Theo very much included-whooped like a scalping party of Red Indians. The T-34’s turret hatch flew open. Out scrambled the panzer commander, his coveralls on fire.
Before he could drop down and use his machine’s wrecked carcass as cover against the Panzer III, Theo picked him off with a burst from the hull machine gun. One of the Ivan’s arms jerked despairingly. Then he slumped back into the inferno from which he’d almost escaped.
“You might have done him a favor there,” Adi said seriously.
“Maybe.” Theo grudged another word. The same thought had crossed his mind. If you were burning, you might want somebody to end your agony. But that wasn’t why Theo had punched his ticket for him. The Soviet panzer commander had been good enough to murder at least one Panzer III. Leave him alive and he’d get himself another T-34 and cause more trouble. Next time, it might be me wasn’t what you’d call a charitable thought, but if you didn’t look out for yourself who would do it for you?