Antiaircraft guns fired at them as they crossed the front. A couple of near misses made the bomber bounce in the air. "Some of those guns are ours!" Sergei said angrily. It happened every time. If it was up in the air, a lot of Russians assumed it had to be hostile. "I'd like to bomb the morons screwing around down there!"
"Do you think their replacements would be any smarter?" Mouradian asked. Sergei considered and reluctantly shook his head. The supply of damn fools was always more than equal to the demand. Then Anastas said, "What do you want to bet the Fritzes shoot at their own flyers, too?"
"Huh," Sergei said in surprise. To Russians, Germans were alarmingly capable: that was what made them so dangerous. It wasn't so easy to imagine them screwing up like ordinary human beings. But if they were so wonderful, why could you drop Germany into Russia and hardly notice where it hit?
They flew on. Poland was a big place in its own right-too big, at any rate, to have antiaircraft guns everywhere. Once they got beyond the front, things grew quiet again. All the same, Sergei wished for eyes that could see above, below, and behind the SB-2 as well as ahead-and all at the same time. It wasn't the first time he'd made that wish. You never knew where trouble would come from next.
"Well, one thing: we'll know when we get to Warsaw," Mouradian said.
"All the buildings and things underneath us, you mean?" Sergei asked.
"Mm, those, too," Anastas said. "But I was thinking, that's when they'll start shooting at us again."
"Oh." After a moment, Sergei nodded. "Yeah, they will, the bastards."
With a wry chuckle, Mouradian said, "We need to get the Chimp up here. He'd call them something that'd set 'em on fire from four thousand meters up."
"He would, wouldn't he?" Sergei agreed. "But don't let him hear you call him that. He'll throw you through a door headfirst, and he won't care that you're an officer or about what they'll do to him afterwards."
"I said it to you, not to him." And, in fact, Mouradian's hand had been over the mouthpiece of his speaking tube. In meditative tones, he went on, "I wonder what Ivan's service jacket looks like. How many times have they busted him down to private for doing things like that? How many times has he made it back to sergeant because he's brave and strong and even kind of clever when he isn't breaking heads? If only he didn't look like a chimp…"
"In that case, he'd get another nickname-Foxface or whatever suited the way he did look," Sergei answered. "Some people just naturally draw them, and he's one."
"Yes, I think so, too. Interesting that you should notice." Stas eyed him as if wondering what to make of such unexpected perceptiveness. Sergei didn't know whether to feel proud or nervous under that dark Southern scrutiny.
Then he stopped worrying about it. He had bigger things to worry about: they'd reached Warsaw's outskirts, and, sure as hell, the Poles were shooting at them from the ground. The formation loosened as all the pilots started jinking. They sped up; they slowed down. They swung left; they swung right. They climbed a little; they descended. The more trouble the Poles-the Germans?-had aiming at them, the more likely they'd make it back to base.
Jinking or not, if your number was up, it was up. A direct hit tore off half an SB-2's right wing. The stricken bomber tumbled toward the ground. Sergei flew past it before he could see whether any parachutes blossomed. That could have been me, he thought, and shuddered.
There lay the Vistula, shining in the sun. Everything built up on the other side was Warsaw proper. "Ready, Ivan?" Sergei called.
"Bet your stinking pussy," Kuchkov answered.
"Now!" Sergei said. If they had no orders to aim at anything in particular, he wasn't about to make a fancy straight bombing run. Why let the gunners get a good shot at him?
As soon as the bombs fell away, he hauled the SB-2's nose around and gunned it back to the east. A few more shell bursts made the plane buck in the air, but he heard-and felt-no fragments biting. And if enemy fighters were in the air, they were going after other Red Air Force formations.
"One more under our belts," Anastas Mouradian said.
"Da." Sergei nodded. Along with rubber and oil and gasoline, he could smell his own fear-and maybe Mouradian's with it. How could you go on doing this, day after day, month after month? But what they'd do to you if you tried to refuse… Yes, not flying missions was even scarier than flying them.
Chapter 21
Fog shrouded the airstrip in northeastern France. Nobody was going anywhere this morning. Chances were, nobody was going anywhere all day. The idled Luftwaffe flyers did what idled flyers had been doing since the first biplanes took off with pilots carrying pistols and hand grenades: they sat around and shot the shit and passed flasks of applejack and cognac.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel was happy enough to join the bull session. When one of the flasks came to him, he passed it on without drinking. "Danke schon," said the pilot to his left. "More for the rest of us."
"Nobody got out any milk for him," another flyer said.
Everybody in the battered farmhouse that did duty for an officers' club laughed. But the laughter sounded different from the way it would have not too long before. Then it would have been aimed at him, deadly as the bullets from a Hurricane's machine guns. Now he was an Oberleutnant with the Ritterkreuz at his throat. His comrades might not love him, but he'd earned their respect.
"Coffee will do," he said mildly, and got another laugh.
"Coffee's harder to come by than booze these days. Coffee worth drinking is, anyhow," said the pilot next to him. "The footwash they issue with our rations…" The other flyer made a horrible face.
"Frenchies don't have much of the good stuff left these days, either," another pilot complained. "Or if they do, they're hiding it better than they used to."
"I don't think they've got it," a third flyer said. "We've been in France since last year, and here it is, just about autumn come round again. You can only scrounge so much. After that, there's nothing left to scrounge."
"There'd be plenty if we'd got into Paris the way we thought we would," someone else said. Rudel couldn't see who it was; the farmhouse was twistier than a fighter pilot's mind. He wouldn't have been surprised if the French family who'd lived in it before fleeing in the early days of the war had unrolled balls of thread of different colors to guide them as they navigated from one room to another. What was left of the upstairs seemed even worse.
A long silence followed the flyer's remark. Anything that touched on politics was dangerous these days. Yes, the squadron was a band of brothers. But brothers could turn on one another, too-look what happened to Joseph. Some people feared that the Gestapo got word of any even possibly disloyal remarks. Others-Hans-Ulrich among them-hoped the security service did. He didn't want to inform on anyone else himself, but he also didn't want to fly alongside people whose hearts weren't in the fight.
"We'll get there yet," he said.
"Sure we will," said another voice he couldn't easily match with a face. "But when, and what will it cost? Will we get to Moscow first?"
Someone else whistled softly. Hans-Ulrich knew the two-front war wasn't popular with his comrades. Maybe it was even less popular than he'd thought. Again, no one seemed to care to take that particular bull by the horns. At last, the pilot sitting next to Rudel said, "I'd rather have the Poles on our side than against us."
"They aren't on our side." To Hans-Ulrich's dismay, that was Colonel Steinbrenner. The squadron commander went on, "Right this minute, Stalin scares them worse than the Fuhrer does. There's a difference. You'd better believe there is, my friends."