The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (5 page)

Part of Rudel wanted
to go after a fourth Russian machine, but common sense told him that was a bad idea. Sooner or later, fighters blazoned with the red star
would
show up around here. The best thing he could do was to be somewhere else when they did. He hauled the Stuka’s nose around and flew off to the west.

IVAN KUCHKOV COUNTED HIMSELF
lucky to be alive. He was a short, squat, brawny Russian peasant. The authorities
had yanked him off the collective farm where he grew up and put him in the bomb bay of an SB-2 medium bomber. Short, squat, and brawny were ideal qualifications for a bombardier. Smart wasn’t, and nobody, including Ivan himself, had ever claimed he was.

He hadn’t tried to keep track of how many missions he’d flown, for instance. He just knew there’d been a lot of them. He also knew that, if you
flew a lot of missions against the Nazis, you were waiting for the law of averages to catch up with you.

And it did. The Tupolev bomber had got hit and caught fire on the way back from a run into German-held Byelorussia. Kuchkov bailed out. He didn’t think either the pilot or the copilot and bomb-aimer made it. He’d flown with Sergei Yaroslavsky ever since they “volunteered” to aid Czechoslovakia
against Fascist invaders when the war was new. Unless his brain was totally fucked, he wouldn’t be flying with the lieutenant any more.

He wasn’t sure he’d be flying at all. Red Army men rescued him and got him away from the Germans after he landed. The first lieutenant commanding the company didn’t want to give him back to the Red Air Force. Lieutenant Pavel Obolensky recognized a hard-nosed
son of a bitch when he saw one. Obolensky wanted Kuchkov fighting for
him
.

“The air force? Faggots fight in the air force,” the lieutenant declared. “You’re a real man, right? Real men belong in the Red Army!”

That was nonsense, as Kuchkov had reason to know. “I bet my
bombs killed more Fascists than all the fuckers in your cocksucking regiment, sir,” he said. He wasn’t being deliberately disrespectful.
He just spoke
mat
, the obscenity-laced underworld and underground dialect of Russian, as naturally as he breathed. He almost didn’t know how
not
to swear.

Luckily for him, Lieutenant Obolensky, like Yaroslavsky, recognized as much and didn’t come down on him on account of his foul mouth. “Maybe they did,” the infantry officer said. “But fuck your mother if we don’t get to watch the cunts die
when we nail ’em.” Like most Russians, he could use
mat
, too, even if he didn’t make a habit of it the way Kuchkov did.

“You’ve got something there,” Ivan admitted. He thought it over, then nodded. “Why the hell not?” Remembering such manners as he owned, he saluted. “Uh, sir.”

For the moment, the Red Air Force probably thought he was as dead as the rest of the SB-2’s crew. That made turning
into a foot soldier easier. One of these days, his proper service would figure out that he’d kept breathing after all. That was likely to complicate his life. But it wasn’t as if he’d deserted, and he’d never been one to borrow trouble. Plenty came along on its own, thank you very much.

Such calculations had nothing to do with his choice. Along with being short and squat and strong, he was dark
and ugly and uncommonly hairy. In the Red Air Force, they called him the Chimp. He hated it. Anyone who came right out and used the nickname to his face, he did his best to deck, and his best was goddamn good. But he knew people called him Chimp behind his back. Maybe joining up with a bunch of strangers would let him escape it.

He might be rugged as a boulder, but he was curiously naïve. He
could get away from the nickname he despised for about twenty minutes—half an hour, tops. As soon as anybody with even a little imagination got a look at him, he was as sure to be tagged Chimp (or maybe King Kong) as a redhead was to get stuck with Red or Rusty.

Lieutenant Obolensky was making calculations of his own. The main one was that Sergeant Kuchkov would be worth eight or ten ordinary
guys in a fight. At least. And so the lieutenant grinned when Kuchkov didn’t make a fuss about staying in the air force.

“Ochen khorosho!”
Obolensky exclaimed. As far as he was concerned, it was very good indeed. “Let’s get you kitted out.”

Ivan’s fur-lined flight suit gave him better cold-weather gear than most of his new comrades enjoyed. Thanks to Obolensky, though, he got a white snow smock
to put over it. He also got a tunic with collar tabs in infantry crimson rather than air force blue. And he got a submachine gun to replace the Tokarev pistol he carried as a personal weapon. He didn’t ditch the pistol, though. You never could tell when an extra weapon would come in handy.

He’d maintained the machine guns in the SB-2’s dorsal and belly turrets. Next to them, the PPD-34 might
have been a kiddy toy. It was plainer and uglier than the Nazis’ Schmeisser, but it had a seventy-one-round drum magazine. That made it heavier than a Schmeisser, but so what? It kept firing a lot longer, too. He knew he’d have to clean the magazine even more often than the weapon itself, which boasted a chromed barrel and chamber. Dirt could foul the clockwork mechanism that fed cartridges into the
PPD. A jam was more likely to prove fatal than just embarrassing. No jams, then.

Ivan shifted the three metal triangles that marked his rank from old collar tabs to new. Lieutenant Obolensky gave him a squad right away—infantry units took more than their share of casualties, and Obolensky had had a corporal who barely needed to shave running it. The junior—very junior—noncom didn’t resent losing
the position he hadn’t held long. Lucky for him, too; if he had, Kuchkov would have whaled the piss out of him.

One advantage of air force life was sleeping out of artillery range of the enemy, sometimes even in a real cot in a heated barracks. Nothing like that here. There weren’t even tents. You wore as many clothes as you could, rolled yourself in a blanket (if you had a blanket) as if you
were a cigar and it the wrapper, and either you slept or you didn’t.

The soldiers in Ivan’s new squad eyed him warily, wondering how he’d cope with living rough. No one came out and said anything about it to him. Not all the infantrymen could read and write, but ignorance didn’t make them stupid. If they pissed him off, he’d make them sorry. He had the look of somebody who wouldn’t worry about
regulations when he did it, either.

Three days after parachuting down into the Red Army, he led his squad out on patrol. He picked a skinny little nervous Jew called Avram as point man. Somebody like that was liable to jump at shadows, but he wouldn’t happily amble into a Nazi trap.

Even with his fur-and-leather flying togs on under the snow smock, Ivan was miserably cold. In wool greatcoats,
the ordinary Red Army men would be even colder. But, from everything everybody said, the Germans would be colder yet. Russians made jokes about Winter Fritz. Ivan hoped all the jokes were true.

A private trotted back to him. “There’s a field up ahead, and a village out past it,” the fellow reported. “Avram says the Germans are holed up in the houses.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” Ivan still didn’t
know how far he could rely on Avram—or anyone else in the squad, come to that. “I’ll fucking see for myself.”

“Be careful going forward, he says,” the private told him. “A sniper in the village can hit you if he sees you.”

“Right.” Kuchkov wasn’t sure if the
Zhid
was only warning him or trying to find out if he was yellow. He didn’t know all the ground-pounders’ tricks yet. He did know enough
to keep his head down and to stay behind trees as much as he could. He made it out to Avram without getting shot at. The point man sprawled behind a stout pine. “So? Nazi cocksuckers in the village?” Ivan asked him.

“
Da
, Comrade Sergeant.” Avram nodded. “If you want to look—carefully—you’ll spot them.”

Only his eyes showing under the snow smock, Ivan peered out from behind the pine. The Germans
in the village weren’t being nearly so cautious. “They’re fucking there, all right,” he agreed. “Scoot back to the lieutenant. Tell him where the cunts are at. Tell him we can take ’em—bet your ass we can—if the machine gun and mortar help keep our dicks up.”

After another nod, Avram silently disappeared. He made a
good
point man. Half an hour later, Lieutenant Obolensky crawled up to check things
out for himself. The mortar crew and machine gunners set up not far away. Ivan smiled wolfishly. Obolensky didn’t think he had the vapors or was showing off, then. Outstanding.

Other men from the company took places near the edge of the
woods. They’d be ready to go forward as soon as they got the word. The lieutenant put a hand on Kuchkov’s shoulder. “You’re right,” he whispered. “We
can
take
them. And we will.”

Soldiers swigged from their hundred-gram vodka rations, borrowing bravery for the fight ahead. Kuchkov drank, too, because he liked to drink. The mortar dropped bombs on the village. The machine gun sprayed death toward it. Obolensky’s brass officer’s whistle squealed like a shoat losing its nuts to the knife. “Forward!” he yelled.

“Urra!”
the Russian soldiers roared as they
swarmed out of the woods. A few rifle shots answered them, but no machine gun. Either the Germans didn’t have one there or the mortar’d knocked their crew out of action. Ivan pounded forward with the rest. Till he got a lot closer, the PPD was just a weight in his hands.

He never did have to fire it. The Nazis put up only a token resistance. Then they got the hell out of there. A bullet broke
one Red Army man’s arm. Another fellow lost the bottom half of his left ear and bled all over his snow smock. The Nazis left two dead men behind. How many casualties they took with them, Ivan couldn’t guess.

The village came back into Soviet hands—not that any peasants remained in it. It had been a dreary little place even before the Germans overran it. Kuchkov didn’t care. He’d proved himself
in front of his men.
That
, he cared about.

VACLAV JEZEK FOUND HIMSELF
even more isolated in Spain than he had been in France. The Czech hadn’t imagined such a thing possible, but there you were. The Spanish Republic might have been the most isolated country, or half a country, in the world. When England and France forgot about fighting Fascism and turned on the Bolsheviks instead, they made a
point of forgetting about their erstwhile Iberian ally.

Great Powers had the luxury of doing such things whenever they pleased. Jezek didn’t. He’d battled the Nazis ever since the day they jumped Czechoslovakia. Instead of surrendering after the Germans overran Bohemia and Moravia and Father Tiso led Slovakia into Fascist-backed “independence,” he crossed the border into Poland and let himself
be interned.

The Russians hadn’t jumped the Poles then, so Poland remained neutral. Czech soldiers were allowed—even unofficially encouraged—to go to Romania (likewise neutral in those days) and from there by sea to France to take service with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Vaclav did all that. His thinking, and the government-in-exile’s, was that keeping the Nazis from conquering France
was his own country’s best and perhaps only hope for eventual resurrection.

That best hope looked none too good. The Czech lands (and Tiso’s puppet Slovakia) remained under the
Reich
’s muscular thumb. Which was not to say Corporal Vaclav Jezek hadn’t done the Germans as much harm as one man could. From a
poilu
who’d never need it any more, he’d acquired an antitank rifle: a godawful heavy weapon
that kicked like a jackass but could drive a thumb-sized armor-piercing bullet right through the hardened steel plating on a German light tank or armored car.

He also discovered that the antitank rifle made a great sniper’s piece. It shot far and fast and flat. After he mounted a telescopic sight on it, he could pick off a man more than two kilometers away: not always, but often enough to be
useful. At half that range, he’d blow off a Nazi’s head with nearly every round.

His countrymen and allies loved him—till the French suddenly turned into Hitler’s allies instead. Just as suddenly, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and its little army became embarrassments. France somehow did find the courtesy not to intern the men who’d given their blood to help keep her free. She let those
of them who so desired cross the Pyrenees to Republican Spain instead.

In France, Sergeant Benjamin Halévy, a French Jew with parents from Prague, had interpreted for the refugee soldiers. Now he was a refugee himself, having no more stomach for fighting on the
Führer
’s side than did the stubborn Czechs.

Someone fluent in French like Halévy could follow a word of Spanish here and there, the
same way a Czech could understand bits of Russian. Vaclav had learned just enough French to swear with. The only foreign language he really spoke was German. That was of no more use to him here than it had been in France. It was the enemy’s tongue in the
Spanish Republic as it had been on the northern side of the mountains, but fewer people in these parts understood it … and most of the ones who
did backed Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists, not the Republic.

Most, but not all. The fighters from the International Brigades had come to Spain to lay their lives on the line to halt the advance of Hitler and Mussolini’s malignant ideology. Some were from America, some from England, but more from Central and Eastern Europe. An awful lot of them could speak German or Yiddish, even if they were no
more native speakers than Vaclav.

By what amounted to a miracle in this bureaucratic age, the powers that be in the Republic realized as much. Instead of sending the Czechs to some threatened border region (and all the Republic’s borders except the one with France were threatened), the Spaniards grouped them with the Internationals defending Madrid.

The Internationals were Red, Red, Red. Vaclav
couldn’t have cared less. Just like him, they killed Fascists. They didn’t seem to worry about anything else but a soldier’s universals: ammo, food, tobacco, and pussy. Nobody tried to make him bow down toward Moscow five times a day.