Two Fronts (36 page)

“Mm, well, maybe not,” Hans-Ulrich allowed.

“There you go.” Now Dieselhorst’s features showed nothing but relief. “When you find yourself a Belgian honey, you can forget all about the other one.”

“Sure.” Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to make the older man worry about him. He didn’t argue or quarrel or make a fuss. He just said, “Let’s go get debriefed,
ja?
We’ve wasted enough time gabbing.”

Off they went, to report on what they’d seen and done over the border in northeastern France. And if Hans-Ulrich wrote a letter in his tent that night, Sergeant Dieselhorst didn’t need to know about it. Chances were Sofia wouldn’t answer anyhow. She hadn’t answered any of the letters he’d sent her from Russia.
She
knew it wasn’t a good idea. Hans-Ulrich, on the other hand …

IVAN KUCHKOV SPRAWLED
in the mud, eyeing the woods ahead. “Is that a motherfucking white flag?” he called to Sasha Davidov. “Or do my cocksucking eyes need rifling so they’ll carry farther?”

“It’s a white flag, Comrade Sergeant,” the point man answered.

“
Da
. It fucking is. Now—next question. Can we trust the
khokhol
cunts showing it?” Kuchkov generally trusted Ukrainians as far as he could throw them. He trusted Ukrainian nationalist fighters even less. Some of them were out-and-out Nazis. Some of them hated the Red Army a lot worse than the Nazis did. (That they might have good reason to hate it bothered him not a bit. Nobody had good reason to want to kill him, not as far as he was concerned.)

“I can’t answer that one, Comrade Sergeant,” Davidov said. “You’ve got to make up your own mind.”

“Fuck,” Kuchkov muttered. He knew he wasn’t the brightest candle on the altar (not a good Soviet comparison, but a good Russian one).

But his choices here seemed stark. He could get into a bigger fight than he really wanted or he could treat with the guys who used a stupid-looking blue-and-yellow flag and an even dumber-looking trident to show they weren’t Soviets or even Russians. Swearing some more under his breath, he got to his feet and waved a dirty snotrag: the biggest piece of white cloth he had.

“Don’t shoot, you whores!” he yelled toward the woods. “We’ll parley!”

If they had a machine gun in there, they could cut him in half. A drunken rifleman could have blown out his kidneys. Standing here waving that stupid hanky, he knew it much too well. He felt naked, with a bull’s-eye painted on his chest.

“Well, come on,” someone in amongst the trees shouted back. The bastard’s Russian had a Ukrainian accent thick enough to slice, but it
was
Russian of a sort. Sensibly, the nationalist didn’t show himself. He went on, “We won’t shoot you till after we talk.”

“Hot shit,” Ivan muttered, but not loud enough to let the Ukrainians hear him. As he started for the woods, he told Davidov, “Give me a fucking hour. If those bitches haven’t turned me loose, yell once. After that, get your cocks in gear and clean ’em out. You hear?”

“
Da
, Comrade Sergeant,” the Jew answered. He had to understand as well as Kuchkov did that that would be unfortunate for the sergeant.

“Put down your piece,” a Ukrainian with a PPD of his own said when Ivan got to the edge of the wood. Kuchkov set the submachine gun on the ground. He still had a pistol in an inside pocket of his padded jacket. He said nothing about it, or about the knife sheathed at the small of his back. He didn’t plan on using either one, but he had them.

The nationalists wore a motley mix of peasant clothes and bits of uniform pilfered from Red Army men and Nazis who didn’t need them any more. One fellow had a tobacco-brown tunic he must have got off a Romanian. A khaki patch kept a bullet hole from letting in cold air.

Kuchkov was going to ask who the Ukrainians’ boss was, but realized he didn’t have to. A guy with a cloth cap, a gingery beard, and wire-framed glasses—damned if he didn’t look like Trotsky’s kid brother—ran their show. “Say your say,” he told Ivan. “If we don’t like it, we’ll make you sorry.”

“I’m already fucking sorry,” Kuchkov said. Baby Trotsky’s smile didn’t get to his eyes. A good thing, too, because the Red Army sergeant went on, “But you pricks’ll be a lot sorrier if you don’t listen up.”

They growled. Some of them hefted their weapons: like their clothes, a crazy mix of Soviet and Fascist designs. They didn’t have the mindless discipline both Germany and the USSR thumped into their troops. If one of them felt like killing Ivan, he was liable to go ahead and do it.

Their leader gestured. That calmed them—a little. He nodded to Kuchkov: not a friendly nod, but one that did allow the Russian to exist a while longer, anyhow. “Go on. We’re listening.”

“I’m here to tell you you should all get lost,” Ivan said. “The Nazi cunts, they’re falling back in the Ukraine. You fuckers aren’t too dumb to see that for yourselves. And fuck all your mothers if you can’t work out what it means. Pretty soon, the Red Army won’t have to worry about those Fascist turds any more. Oh, no—they’ll worry about you shits instead. And they’ll land on you with both feet if you’re still around to be landed on.”

“We aren’t afraid of the Red Army,” Baby Trotsky said. His followers’ heads bobbed up and down.

“You scared of the NKVD pricks? You scared of the fucking camps?” Ivan demanded. “You assholes’re out here playing soldier in the woods. You scared of your wives and your sisters getting gangbanged back in the villages?”

“Fuck you in the mouth, Russian pig,” one of the nationalists said. That was a woman’s voice. Her German tunic was enough too big to mask her boobs. And she was as rough-skinned and dirty as any of her comrades, if less hairy. She was also as ugly as any of them.

Even Kuchkov could tell saying that wasn’t smart. “Get lost,” he repeated. “We need these fucking woods. The whole corps is moving up. We’re damn well gonna give it to the Hitlerites, and we’ll give it to any other cocksuckers who get in our way, too. But if you, like, go and disappear, I don’t know who the fuck you are. I don’t give a shit, either.”

“Then what?” their leader asked bitterly. “Chekists? Commissars? How many have they already murdered down here?”

You pricks had it coming
. Ivan didn’t say that, either. “You fight my guys, you’ll fucking lose,” he did say. “You can’t whip us without the Nazi pricks, and they can’t whip us even with you assholes.”

That drew more growls from the Ukrainian nationalists. “We ought to kill you just for coming out with such shit,” Baby Trotsky told him.

“Chance I took when I came over here,” Ivan answered with a shrug. “But if you do, my thieves are coming after me, and they won’t put down their machine pistols when you tell ’em to. They’ll fuck you all in the mouth with them, fuck your mothers if they won’t. I left a smart kike in charge of them. He’ll take care of all that shit—you bet he will.”

The nationalists’ leader spat on the muddy ground. “Kikes! They’re Christ-killers
and
they’re Reds. Say what you want about Hitler, but he’s got the right idea on them.”

“I don’t wag my dick at any of that political bullshit,” Kuchkov said, more or less truthfully. “So listen up, fuckers. You can shoot me, and then you can fight my guys. Or you can clear out and give somebody else shit later. What’s it gonna be?”

Baby Trotsky couldn’t just issue orders like a proper officer. No, the Ukrainians had to put their heads together and hash things out. When they did, they used their own language. Ivan could follow maybe one word in four. Some of them wanted to do for him; he was pretty sure of that.

But their leader didn’t. At last, his view prevailed, even if some of the other bandits looked disgusted. Returning to Russian, Baby Trotsky said, “All right, you can have these goddamn woods. Give us two hours to withdraw.”

“That’s what you told her, too, I bet,” Ivan said. The ginger-bearded guy snorted. Kuchkov went on, “You got a fucking deal.”

“That’s just the kind of deal I think we have,” the nationalist said bleakly. He pointed in the direction from which Kuchkov had come. “Go on. Get lost. Two hours, remember. Move sooner and we’ll shoot at you.”

“You don’t need to stick your cock in my ear. I heard you.” Ivan headed back to his own men. The Ukrainians hadn’t swiped his PPD, as he’d at least half expected.

“Good to see you in one piece,” Sasha Davidov said. “Time was getting low. What’s the deal. Is there one?”

“Two hours for them to fuck off. Then the woods are ours,” Kuchkov said. To his amazement, the Red Army men raised a cheer for him. He couldn’t remember the last time anything—well, anything but pussy—made him feel so good.

Wehrmacht
quartermasters doled out winter clothing as if they’d had to pay for it themselves. Wearing chevrons on his left sleeve helped Willi Dernen acquire some for himself. The padded jacket he got reversed from white to blotchy camouflage. So did his quilted trousers. And his felt-and-leather overboots were almost as good as Russian
valenki
.

He whitewashed his helmet, too. “Could be worse,” he allowed. “Our first winter in Russia, we had to make do with ordinary uniforms and whatever we could steal from the Ivans.”

“I remember,” Adam Pfaff said. “Snow smocks made from bed sheets—that kind of crap.”

“Oh, yeah.” Willi rolled his eyes. “And the nails in the regular marching boots that sucked cold right up into your feet.”

“Jesus Christ! Don’t you jokers ever do anything but piss and moan?” Arno Baatz said. “We’ve got this good stuff now. Why do you want to keep bitching about the old days? We made it through, didn’t we?”

“Some of us did, anyway,” Willi said darkly. “Some of us froze to death.”

Awful Arno glared at him. “Quit pissing and moaning, I told you!”

“No, you didn’t,
Herr Unteroffizier
. You asked me if we ever did anything else. We do: we kill Ivans.”

Baatz opened his mouth. Then he shut it again without saying anything. He stomped off, his own winter gear slung over his left arm. “He’ll make you pay for that,” Adam Pfaff predicted.

“I’ve been paying since I put on the goddamn uniform,” Willi said. “Some units have good corporals and sergeants. Just by the law of averages and dumb luck, they’re bound to. But me, I’ve been dealing with Awful Arno Baatz since 1938. Where’s the justice in that?”

“Justice? Ha!” Pfaff sad. “Count your blessings he hasn’t screwed you over worse than he has.”

“If those are blessings, the anti-sin cannon”—
Landser
slang for chaplains—“shoot more shit than the quartermasters do,” Willi replied.

“That’s how it looks to me, sure as hell. Most of what the chaplains come out with is pure shit.” Pfaff looked back over his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t said that loud enough for Awful Arno to overhear. Baatz had all the usual small-town, small-soul pieties, and expected everyone else to come equipped with them, too.

Something off in the distance, almost too faint and too low to hear … Willi’s head swung that way, as a dog’s would have. “Those are panzers,” he said—not quite the worst thing he could think of (the worst thing he could think of would have been a volley of the Russians’ screaming rockets—Stalin’s Organ, soldiers called them), but close enough.

Adam Pfaff brought it closer yet: “Those are Russian panzers.”

Willi nodded glumly. For one thing, they were coming out of the east, where the
Wehrmacht
had no panzers. For another, the Ivans’ diesels sounded different from the gasoline engines his own country used. To Willi, they sounded more sinister, more evil, but he would have admitted he was prejudiced.

Awful Arno’s face was a study. He wanted to deny that there were panzers in the neighborhood. If he couldn’t do that, he wanted to deny that they belonged to the Red Army. If he couldn’t even do
that
 … Well, no wonder his ugly, overfed mug was a study.

He yelled for the radioman. That worthy couldn’t come quickly, not with his set and the batteries that powered it in a heavy pack on his back. Awful Arno wasn’t just yelling by the time he did arrive. The underofficer was screaming: “Get us an 88!
Schnell!
Call the regiment! Call the division! Call your granny if you want to—I don’t care who you call! It doesn’t matter if you pull that 88 out of your asshole! Just get it here! On the double!”

Pfaff giggled helplessly. Willi found himself doing the same thing. He was much too likely to get killed in the next few minutes, but here he was, laughing like a fool. If you had to go, he supposed there were worse ways. He didn’t want to go, but he was unpleasantly aware he might not get a choice.

Well, there was always a choice. You could run away. But it wasn’t much of a choice, not here, not now. No guarantee the T-34s wouldn’t catch up with you anyway. No guarantee the guys on your own side wouldn’t shoot you in the back for bolting. And the certain sour knowledge that you’d be letting your buddies down. That carried more weight than either of the others.

The radioman gabbled into his microphone or telephone or whatever the hell you called it. He fiddled with the set—switching frequencies? Then he talked some more, louder and more urgently.