Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

The officer didn’t complain, though. He just said, “I’m Arkady Lapshin. Come along with me.”

Konstantin came. A jeep waited outside: Lend-Lease from the last war or captured in this one. The lance-corporal behind the wheel saluted Lapshin, nodded to Konstantin, and zoomed away as soon as they got in.

Sometimes he stayed on the road, sometimes not. The going was often better away from it. Much of the toughest fighting had been along the highways, and they showed it. The jeep went wherever the driver wanted it to. For a vehicle with tires, not tracks, it got around.

Artillery began to fire as they neared the front. Lapshin took it in stride. Morozov tried not to fidget, there on the jeep’s hard back seat. He was used to armor between himself and shell fragments. These were Soviet shells going out, but American shells were liable to start coming in to answer them.

He thought the driver would take him into a tank park, the way they’d done things the last time he needed a new machine. But he’d had three crewmen out of four then. Now he was the sole survivor. If he hadn’t been head and shoulders out of the T-54 when it got hit, he’d be as dead as the rest of them. Luck. All luck. Or God, if you could take God seriously.

No tank park this time. A tank under some fruit trees. Three men were working on the engine: a corporal, a lance-corporal, and a private. The jeep stopped. Lapshin hopped out. “This way,” he said, so Konstantin followed him.

The three soldiers-especially the corporal-eyed Morozov with what could only be disdain. He knew what that had to mean. Their old commander must have stopped one, maybe when he stood up in his cupola. The corporal had to be the gunner. He would have wanted command-and the promotion likely to go with it-for himself. How big a pain in the neck would he be now that he hadn’t got them?

Captain Lapshin was, or affected to be, oblivious to the sour looks. “Here’s your new commander, boys,” he said cheerfully. “Sergeant Morozov did it in the last war, too. He’s just over a wound. Morozov, here’s your crew: Juris Eigims, Gennady Kalyakin, and Vazgen Sarkisyan.” He introduced them in order of rank, and almost surely in the order gunner-driver-loader.

Great, Morozov thought. Only one other Slav. Sarkisyan was squat and swarthy, with a beard he’d need to shave twice a day. He looked like the Armenian he was, in other words. Kalyakin had a Byelorussian accent. Eigims…Yes, Eigims would be trouble.

By his name, he was a Latvian, or maybe a Lithuanian. Either way, he would have been a kid when the USSR annexed his homeland. Some of the Balts were still pissy over that, not that they could do anything about it. Pissy or not, he’d have to shoot straight if he wanted to keep breathing. But how many other ways would he try to undercut his new superior? By the scowl on his blue-eyed face, as many as he could.

“What were you guys doing with the engine?” Morozov asked.

“Just trying to get it running smoother,” Eigims answered. His Russian held a musical lilt. He seemed fluent enough, which was good. Sarkisyan didn’t talk much, but a loader didn’t need a whole lot of Russian. As long as he got the difference between AP and HE, they’d do fine. A gunner, though, had to be able to talk and to understand.

“How’s the fuel? How much water in it? How are the filters?” Konstantin asked the basic questions. Water in the fuel was worse than in a gasoline engine. And diesel fuel, being thicker than gasoline, carried more dirt and impurities along with it. With bad filters, crud could mess up your machinery in nothing flat.

“All seem all right. Check for yourself if you care to, Comrade Sergeant.” By the way Eigims said it, Konstantin realized they’d gummed up the engine on purpose somewhere. Where? That was for him to find.

And he did, too: clogged injectors on two of the engine’s cylinders. He cleaned them out. “Fire it up now,” he said. “You should be able to hear a difference.” Juris Eigims kicked at the dirt. If he’d disliked Konstantin before, he hated him now.

–

As things went, Luisa Hozzel was lucky. The Russians who’d swept into Fulda hadn’t raped her. They seemed to be behaving better than they had in the last war. The house had lost its windows, but it hadn’t taken any direct shell hits. Now she had plywood or cardboard over all of them.

And she’d taken Gustav’s Third Reich medals up into the attic and out of sight before any Red Army soldiers came in. Most of the men around here had served in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen -SS, and most of the ones who had served fought on the Eastern Front. The Russians hadn’t dragged anybody out of his house and shot him in the town square for what he’d done then. A couple of men on the block had gone missing, though, and their families with them. Maybe they’d died in the first hours of the invasion. Maybe they’d fled. Luisa didn’t believe it, though.

She stayed indoors as much as she could. Almost all the women in Fulda seemed to do that. The Russians might show better manners than they’d had before, but how far could you trust them? People still whispered horror stories about everything they’d done in eastern Germany.

She couldn’t stay in all the time, though. She had to get food. Whenever she headed for the grocer’s, she put on her oldest, frumpiest clothes. She messed up her hair so it looked more like a stork’s nest than anything else. She scrubbed her face with harsh laundry soap. She did her best to look as if she were in her late forties, not her late twenties.

So far, it had worked. The Americans who’d held Fulda before had whistled and howled at her when she walked by. She’d always ignored them, which made them laugh. They went no further than laughing and whistling and howling, though. Plenty of other German girls didn’t ignore them. If you were out for what you could get, you could get plenty from the Amis.

By contrast, the Russians now in Fulda ignored her. Or they had so far, though every time she left the house her heart jumped into her mouth till she got inside again.

Another trip today. She stuck a stringbag inside her purse, fortified herself with a knock of straight schnapps, and stepped out into the big, dangerous world. Sunlight, even the watery sunlight Fulda usually got, made her blink and squint. She didn’t mind. With her face screwed up, she’d look older and homelier yet.

Fulda had changed since the Russians drove the Americans out. Part of that was battle damage; the Amis and the German emergency militia had fought hard to hold the town, but they’d got overwhelmed. (She had no idea what had happened to Gustav after he and Max and some others went off to play soldiers again. She prayed he was all right. She didn’t know what else she could do.)

And part of it was the different flavor of propaganda she had to put up with. When Fulda was part of the U.S. occupation zone, posters had said things like It goes forward with the Marshall plan! It had seemed to go forward, too. Now…

Now she stared at Joseph Stalin and his bushy mustache-more impressive than Hitler’s, she had to admit-everywhere she went. For a free, socialist Germany! the message under his portrait said. Other posters showed the Russian hammer and sickle and the East German hammer and compass side by side. Together to victory! that one shouted. Still others showed Russian tanks and soldiers going forward. They declared The proletariat on the march is invincible!

Walls, fences, lampposts, telephone poles-they’d all got a thick layer of those posters. She hadn’t yet seen a dog with one of them pasted to its side, but that had to be only a matter of time.

Three Russian soldiers came up the street toward her. They reeled instead of walking-they were drunk. Everything people said about how Russians poured it down seemed to be true. Luisa got out of their way and ducked into a shop that sold secondhand clothes. With Russians, as with her own people, drunks were dangerous. They didn’t care about what they did, and they forgot rules they respected sober.