Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

“I haven’t heard anything special, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are,” Bachman answered. “If Stalin decides to start something, all the Russian panzers in the world’ll charge west through the Fulda Gap.”

Gustav grunted and lit a cigarette. With the Deutschmark a going concern, you could smoke your cigarettes again. They weren’t currency any more, the way they had been in the first couple of years after the war.

The ritual of tapping the cigarette and striking a match gave him a few seconds to think. Max wasn’t wrong. Gustav knew it. The Amis had to know it, too. The broad, flat valley of the river that ran by Fulda was the best panzer country along the Russian zone’s western frontier. Once through it, the T-34s-and whatever new models Stalin had up his sleeve-could swarm straight toward the Rhine.

“I wonder whether they’d want us to lend a hand if the Reds do come,” Gustav said in musing tones, blowing a smoke ring up at the low ceiling. “Some of us still remember what to do.”

“Think so, eh?” Bachman said with a dry chuckle. “Well, maybe we do. And I’ll tell you this-they might not have wanted to play with Adolf, but they won’t mind the rest of us dying for our country…and theirs. When the Russians come, you grab everybody you can.” Gustav nodded. Again, his boss wasn’t wrong.

Konstantin Morozov slid a ruble across the bar. “Another,” he said in Russian.

“Da,” the bartender said, and gave him a fresh mug of beer. The man in the apron was a German, but he understood enough Russian to get by. Damn near every Fritz in Meiningen did. With a couple of Soviet tank armies stationed near the border with the American zone, bartenders and shopkeepers and waiters and whores needed to know the occupiers’ language if they were going to get money out of them.

For that matter, Morozov could have asked for his refill in German. He’d never be fluent, but he could manage. Unless he had to, though, he preferred not to. He’d been a tankman since 1944. He’d joined the Red Army just before Operation Bagration, the great attack that drove the Nazis out of the Soviet Union. He’d seen what they’d done to the rodina, the motherland. And he’d paid them back, with as much interest as he could add, in the grinding drive west that ended in Berlin the following spring. German still felt dirty in his mouth.

He’d been a private starting out, of course, a seventeen-year-old kid slamming shells into the breech of a T-34/85’s cannon. New fish always started as loaders; the job didn’t take much in the way of brains. If you showed you had something on the ball-and if you lived, naturally-you could go on to bigger and better things.

He’d had four (or was it five?) tanks killed out from under him. A puckered scar on his left calf showed where a German machine-gun bullet bit him when he was bailing out from one of them. Burn scars mostly hidden by the right sleeve of his khaki tunic reminded him he hadn’t got out of another soon enough. That had hurt like a mad bastard-and burning human flesh smelled too much like a pork roast forgotten in a hot oven.

But he was still here. That put him ahead of the game right there. So many of the men who’d fought alongside him were dead, some in graves, some not. And the Nazis had murdered civilians for fun, or so it seemed. He’d heard officers arguing about whether the Great Patriotic War cost the USSR twenty or thirty million deaths. Both numbers were too enormous to mean much to him. Twenty or thirty deaths? A tragedy. Multiply by a million? A statistic, nothing more.

He eyed the bartender. The fellow was about thirty-five. He had a scar of his own, on his forehead. Chances were he hadn’t picked it up playing tiddlywinks. “What did you do during the war?” Morozov asked him in Russian.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” the Fritz answered. And maybe that was true, and maybe it was horseshit. Maybe he just didn’t want to admit to whatever it was.

Well, too damn bad if he didn’t. Konstantin asked the same question in German. If he didn’t like the answer he got, he’d knock the bastard into the middle of next week. It was possible for a Red Army senior sergeant to get in trouble for roughing up a German. It was possible, yeah, but it sure wasn’t easy.

But the bartender said, “Oh! During the war !”-so maybe that was what he hadn’t got. “I fought in the Low Countries and France. Then I went to North Africa. I got this there.” Konstantin thought he was going to touch that scar, but he did more. He popped his right eye out of its socket. It lay in the palm of his hand-it was glass.

“It’s a good match for the one you kept.” Morozov meant that. He hadn’t noticed it was artificial. It had to be German work. Russian glass eyes looked like, well, glass eyes. The tankman gestured. “Put it back. You aren’t so pretty without it.”

“Sie haben Recht,” the German agreed gravely. Back went the eye. He blinked a couple of times to settle it in place. Now that Konstantin knew, he could tell the eye was false. But he never would have thought so had the Fritz not shown him.

He downed the beer. He’d drunk enough to feel it, not enough to get tipsy. After the daily combat ration of a hundred grams of vodka, beer seemed like water going down the hatch. It did taste nice, though; he had to give it that. Good vodka didn’t taste like anything much. Bad vodka reminded him of an accident with a chemistry set.

Drinking beer, you had to work to get smashed. It was easy with vodka. The whole point to drinking vodka was getting smashed. Maybe the point to drinking beer was drinking without getting smashed. If so, it was a point too subtle for Konstantin to fathom.

He drained the mug, tipped the barkeep, and went back to the toilets. They were cleaner than they would have been in a Russian dive, but not a lot cleaner. The ammonia reek of stale piss stung his nose.

After leaving the tavern, he walked back to the tent city outside of town. It was cold. Some snow lay on the ground. He’d known plenty worse, though. The Red Army didn’t worry about the weather. Whatever it happened to be, you did what your commanders told you.

Now, instead of loading in a T-34, he commanded a T-54. He wished the Red Army’d had these during the last war. They would have made the Hitlerites roll over onto their backs and show their bellies in jig time. Thick armor, that elegant turtle-shell dome of a turret, a 100mm gun that would have smashed up every Tiger or Panther ever made…

Someone waved to him. He came to attention-it was Captain Oleg Gurevich, the company commander. “What do you need, Comrade Captain?” he asked.

“Is your tank ready for action, Sergeant?” Gurevich demanded.

“I serve the Soviet Union, sir!” Morozov said, which was never the wrong answer. “The tank is ready to roll as soon as we climb aboard.” That wasn’t quite true, but it came close enough. They wouldn’t move forward right this minute. Konstantin didn’t think they would, anyhow. “But what’s gone wrong now?”

“It’s the stinking Americans,” Gurevich said. He was even younger than Konstantin. He’d come into the Red Army after the war ended. He didn’t remember, or care to remember, that the Americans had been allies against Hitler. Konstantin did, though he didn’t say so-admitting such things wasn’t just dangerous, it was suicidal. The officer went on, “It’s looking more and more as though they think they’ll have to use atomic weapons to stop the advance of the victorious Chinese People’s Liberation Army. In his wisdom, Comrade Stalin has decided that the Soviet Union will not sit idly by while the imperialists assail a fraternal socialist state.”