He wasn’t wrong. Rudel wished he were. The Stuka was designed to fly where the Luftwaffe dominated the air, where Bf-109s kept enemy fighters away from it. The dive-bomber wasn’t quite a sitting duck in flight, but it sure was a waddling duck, especially when weighted down by panzer-busting cannon pods.
“What else can we do?” Hans-Ulrich said. “If they order us up, we’ll go. And we’ll do the best we can while we’re up, too.”
“Of course we will,” Sergeant Dieselhorst answered. They’d flown all those missions together. Even if they didn’t always like each other, that bound them together more tightly than some husbands and wives. Each of them would have been dead a dozen times if not for the other. Then the sergeant went on, “Have to hope we come down in one piece, though.”
“Hope? Yes,” Rudel said. “But sometimes you do what you have to do because other people depend on you to do it right.”
And you’ve got to do it no matter what happens to you. He didn’t come out with that. Sergeant Dieselhorst understood it perfectly well. The difference between them was that Dieselhorst hated it, while to Hans-Ulrich it was just a price that might have to be paid as part of the cost of doing the Fuhrer’s business. He wasn’t eager to pay the price, but he was ready.
They flew again, against batteries of English heavy guns that German artillery hadn’t been able to take out. The Stuka had been invented as an extension of artillery. It was the ideal kind of mission for the dive-bombers-as long as German fighters could keep enemy planes off them.
Somebody had to think the mission was important: both Bf-109s and FW-190s flew top cover for the Stukas. Some Focke-Wulf fighters were also being used as ground-attack planes, beginning to take on the role the Ju-87 had held for so long. FW-190s were much faster and more maneuverable than Stukas-no doubt about that. But they couldn’t put their bombs down right on the center of a fifty-pfennig coin. They couldn’t terrorize enemy soldiers with Jericho Trumpets, either. They were too modern. They had retractable landing gear, not the Stuka’s fixed installations.
Hans-Ulrich liked the kind of plane he flew. He’d been in the Stuka since the war started. He didn’t want anything new. The Ju-87 might look obsolete, but it was still up for jobs no other aircraft could match. The squadron wouldn’t have been attacking this English artillery unit if that weren’t so.
The front near the Belgian border seemed pretty quiet as the Stukas flew over it. Both the French and the English had made some spasmodic lunges against the Wehrmacht’s defenses. They’d got bloodied for their trouble, and hadn’t seemed so eager since.
A little flak came up at the Ju-87s, but only a little. Some machine guns winked petulantly upward, too, even if they had not the slightest chance of reaching high enough to hurt the planes.
Back behind the lines were gun pits by the dozen, by the score, by the hundred. Seeing so many down there gave Hans-Ulrich pause. The Western democracies might not be thrilled about the war, but they weren’t giving up on it, either. They were just fighting it on the cheap, with shells rather than with soldiers.
They had more flak guns protecting the artillery. Unlike the ones up by the trenches, these were in earnest. Puffs of fire and smoke shaped like armless men sprang into being not far from the Stukas. Hans-Ulrich’s plane bucked in the air after a near miss.
“I see the target,” Colonel Steinbrenner said into Rudel’s earphones. The squadron CO tipped his plane into a dive. “Follow me down.”
One after another, the Stukas did. As Hans-Ulrich started his dive, Sergeant Dieselhorst reported, “Our fighters are mixing it up with the Indians.”
“Let’s hope they can hold them off till we drop our bombs,” Rudel answered. He didn’t know what else he could say. They would certainly be faster and more maneuverable once they’d shed a tonne of explosives and sheet metal. Not fast. Not maneuverable. Not enough to escape enemy fighters. But more of each.
Down below, the heavy English guns swelled from little plasticine toys to scale models to the real things in seconds. The real things, damn them, had still more flak guns interspersed among them. The Stuka right in front of Rudel’s took a direct hit and fell out of the sky. The pilot and the man in the rear seat never had a prayer.
Rudel yanked on the bomb-release lever. The big bomb under the Ju-87’s midline fell free. He pulled the stick back, hard, fighting to bring up the nose. Everything went black for a split second as the blood drained from his head. Then Sergeant Dieselhorst’s exultant shout brought him back to himself: “You knocked that baby ass over teakettle!”
“Good,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Now we have to get out of here in one piece.” He gunned the Stuka for all it was worth-which, unfortunately, wasn’t much. If a Hurricane or a Spitfire broke through the fighter screen higher up and dove on him, he’d go down like the luckless fellows in the Ju-87 right below his.
What made one man die while another lived? It was and wasn’t an odd question to wonder about while racing along just above the treetops. His father wouldn’t have wondered. The stern minister would have said it was God’s will, and that would have settled that-for him, anyhow.
Well, of course it’s God’s will. Everything is God’s will, Hans-Ulrich thought. But that only shifted the question. Why was God so arbitrary?
Why did He decide one fellow’s time was up and let another, worse, chap live to a ripe old age and father eight children? Where was the justice in that?
Because He was God, and He could. It was an answer of sorts, but not one that brought Hans-Ulrich any comfort.
What brought him comfort was not seeing any RAF fighters boring in on his lumbering plane, not hearing Dieselhorst’s machine gun go off in what would probably be a futile gesture of defiance as an enemy swooped down on them. Yes, it was amazing how comforting negative information could be.
Chapter 25
“C’mon, you whore. Let’s clean your cunt.” Ivan Kuchkov shoved the pull-through into the barrel of his PPD submachine gun. Sasha Davidov was tending to his PPD, too. He raised a dark eyebrow. “You know, Comrade Sergeant, anybody listening to you would think you were talking about something else.”
“Fuck your mother, Zhid! Like I give a shit,” Kuchkov told the skinny little point man. His voice held no particular malice. That was just the way he talked, to his weapon and to the people around him. He listened to the phonograph record in his mind of what he had said a moment before and started to laugh. “All right, fuck me, too. That is pretty cocksucking funny.”
Along with the men in his section, he crouched in a clearing in some bushes near a stream. Artillery muttered in the distance. There were Germans within a couple of kilometers, but not far within that distance. Ukrainian nationalist bandits were liable to be prowling around, too. They might be closer than the Fritzes; they were commonly better at sneaking up on things.
They were also dumber than the Fritzes. Couldn’t they see that, regardless of whether Hitler or Stalin won the war, they were going to get it in the neck? Did it really matter to them whether they got it from the Gestapo or the NKVD?
For now, without orders to move against the Hitlerites, Kuchkov didn’t intend to do one single goddamn thing but sit here and play with his dick. He fought when he had to. He didn’t mind killing Germans, not even a little bit. But they could kill him, too. Why give them unnecessary chances?
Somebody off in the distance made a noise. Bushes were good for all kinds of things. They kept people on the other side from seeing you, and they warned you when trouble was on the way. Kuchkov quickly reassembled his PPD and slammed the big snail drum of a magazine into place under the weapon. If that noise meant trouble, he could throw a lot of rounds at it before he had to worry about reloading.