Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

“Fuck me in the mouth!” Ivan said. He had to bite down hard to keep from adding You stinking bitch! I wish I’d done that! However much he wished it, it wasn’t one of the things you came out with, not unless you wanted to hand your buddies your balls forever. Instead, he stuck to business: “What the piss happened?”

“I was there, where I was supposed to be,” Vitya answered. “I’d dug a good foxhole, and stuck branches and stuff in the dirt to hide it. I heard a noise-somebody pushing through the bushes.”

“We all heard it,” Sasha broke in. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they heard it back in Kiev.”

“Uh-huh.” Still pale as death, the sentry went on, “So I challenged. But this guy told me to tie my cock in a knot. That’s not the word, so I fired. I figured he was a Ukrainian bandit or something. And I hit him. Only-”

“It was the political officer,” Ivan finished for him. That stupid, arrogant answer sounded like a politruk , all right.

Vitya nodded shakily. “It was. Christ have mercy, I didn’t know!”

“Is he dead?” Sasha Davidov asked.

“He’s dead, all right-dead as makhorka .” Ryakhovsky nodded again, grimly this time. “I got him right in the bull’s-eye, just above his nose.”

“Let’s make fucking sure,” Kuchkov said. “Take us to him.” Wounding a politruk might be even worse than killing one, if such a thing were possible. A wounded political officer would testify against you, and of course they’d listen to him first and to you not at all. That was how things worked.

But the soldiers wouldn’t have to worry about that here. Maxim Zabelin lay crumpled on his side, his own machine pistol next to him. He still looked pissed off; his features hadn’t relaxed into blankness yet. The hole above his nose was small and neat. Going out, the round from the Mosin-Nagant had blown off most of the back of his head.

“What are we going to do?” Sasha Davidov whispered.

Kuchkov had been worrying at that himself. Reluctantly, he said, “Vitya, we’ve got to take it to the lieutenant. All the bastards at the camp heard your dick shoot off, y’know? We can’t fucking cover it over in hay. Some cocksucker’ll get toasted and blab, and then you’ll catch it ten times as bad.”

“Couldn’t I just run off?” Ryakhovsky asked miserably. He didn’t like the odds, and Ivan didn’t blame him.

But Sasha said, “No, you can’t do that, Vitya. Not this time. They’d think you murdered Lieutenant Zabelin on purpose and then did a bunk. If they grabbed you after that …” He didn’t go on, or need to. Vitya could paint those gruesome pictures inside his own head.

“Listen to him. He’s a goddamn smart sheeny,” Ivan said. “You better come. You got a chance, I think. The lieutenant, he’s a halfway decent prick.” For an officer , he thought, but he didn’t say that. Vitya had plenty to worry about without it.

The luckless (or lucky, depending on how you looked at things) sentry came along almost apathetically, as if he knew he couldn’t do anything about whatever was going to happen to him. No, not as if . He couldn’t, and that was the long and short of it.

Lieutenant Obolensky and the men with him had camped several hundred meters east of the stream in a ruined farmhouse whose surviving walls would shield his fire from the Germans’ eyes. “What’s up, Sergeant?” he asked when Kuchkov and Ryakhovsky and Davidov came back to him.

“Comrade Lieutenant, we’ve got us one cunt of a problem,” Kuchkov answered. He elbowed Vitya in the ribs. “Tell the lieutenant what the fuck happened.”

Stammering, Vitya did. “I wouldn’t’ve fired if he’d given me the word. Honest to God, Comrade Lieutenant, sir, I wouldn’t’ve!” he wailed at the end.

Lieutenant Obolensky didn’t say anything at all for more than a minute. By his face, he was thinking hard, though. “I believe you,” he replied at last. “But I’m not sure how much good that does you. I’m going to have to report this, too. I’m sorry, but I am. My dick gets cut off if don’t.”

“Yes, sir,” Ryakhovsky said in doom-filled tones.

“Don’t give up yet,” the company commander told him. “Zabelin may have been a politruk , but he was a jerk, too. The higher-ups in the regiment know it. He’d be plenty dumb enough to try something like that, and of course he paid for it.”

“The higher-ups in the regiment may know it.” Vitya didn’t sound any happier. He had his reasons, too: “But do the Party higher-ups?”

They might not. Ivan knew it, and so did Vitya. Party higher-ups had too good a chance to be jerks themselves. That often seemed part of how you got ahead in the Party.

Lieutenant Obolensky couldn’t say any such thing, of course. He did say, “I’ll do what I can for you. Fuck your mother if I don’t.” With that, Ryakhovsky-and Ivan-had to content themselves. Fighting the Germans was straightforward enough. When you had to deal with your own side, though …

Hermann Witt beamed at the new panzer. “Isn’t that the prettiest thing you ever saw?” he said. “The prettiest thing without a pussy, anyhow?”

“Sorry, Sergeant.” Adi Stoss shook his head. “A Tiger is the prettiest thing I ever saw that didn’t have a pussy. But this is next best.”

Theo Hossbach found himself nodding. That didn’t count against his daily word ration. A Panzer IV with a long-barreled 75 couldn’t match a Tiger, no. But it pretty much could match a T-34. After the Panzer III with its doorknocker of a gun, that was definitely within shouting distance of heaven on earth.

Lothar Eckhardt, who’d had to try to keep the whole crew alive firing that doorknocker, nodded along with him. “It’ll be nice not to see our shells’ drive bands sticking out of a Russian panzer’s armor for a change.”

“We’re going to have to practice like mad bastards on the sights and fire-control system, though,” Witt said. “They’re a lot fancier than what we’ve been using. They’ve got to be, ’cause we can hit from so much farther away.”

“We’ll do what we need to do,” the gunner told the commander. “We don’t want to get any closer to T-34s than we have to, even in this baby. If we can hit them when they’re likely to miss us, that’s how I like it.”

“You guys back in the turret have all the hard studying to do,” Adi said, a certain gloating note in his voice. “My controls and my instruments are almost the same as the ones in the old III, and Theo’s got the same radio set and the same machine gun as he did before.”

“My coaxial machine gun hasn’t changed any.” But Eckhardt couldn’t help adding, “The cannon sure has, though.”

Theo thought Adi shouldn’t have bragged that way. The same notion must have crossed Sergeant Witt’s mind, because he said, “The suspension and the engine aren’t the same. You guys can take the lead on dealing with the differences.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Adi said. Theo sent him a look that meant something like I’ll get you later . Anything that had to do with the suspension-working a thrown track back onto the drive sprocket, for instance-involved backbreaking heavy labor.

“You’re welcome. My pleasure,” Witt said. His grin meant it would indeed be his pleasure to watch somebody else busting his hump over heavy labor like that. But the smile also promised he would get in there and help when the labor did get heavy. He was a good commander, and good panzer commanders did things like that.

“Best way we can practice with the new fire-control system is to go hunting Russians,” Kurt Poske said.

“The whole company will be doing that,” Witt said.