Harry Turtledove: Fallout

“Yes, sir.” Ihor thought of the move a little differently. Whatever it was, he was stuck with it. He helped some of the guys from his squad climb aboard a truck, then scrambled in himself. It was getting dark outside the canvas-covered bed of the truck. That pleased him. Motor convoys on the road in broad daylight made tasty, tempting targets for fighters with guns and rockets.

Away they went. In the darkness, of course, the driver couldn’t see the potholes and dodge them. Ihor suspected he could barely see the road-or maybe the trouble was that he barely knew how to drive. They headed east when they set out, which made sense: everything west of where they had been belonged to the imperialists. But they kept going, much farther and much longer than Ihor had expected.

“I think we’re back in the German Democratic Republic,” one of the soldiers said after a while.

Ihor needed a few seconds to remember that that was the official name for the part of Germany the USSR had kept after the Nazis got finished off. German Communists ran it these days, but Communists from the Soviet Union ran them. None of the Soviet satellites could do much without permission from Stalin and his henchmen. The German Democratic Republic could do next to nothing.

The soldiers piled out at a town called Juterbog. A man who’d fought in Marshal Koniev’s army had gone through it in 1945. He said it lay south of Berlin. Ihor couldn’t see much of it. What he could see told him the Fritzes hadn’t rebuilt it since Koniev’s troops overran it.

They got black bread and salted herrings there, with tea to wash them down. Once they’d eaten, the lieutenant gathered the company together. “Well, boys, now I know what we’ll be doing next,” Kosior said.

“What’s that, sir?” several men asked, Ihor among them.

Kosior paused to light a match to get a papiros going. The flame briefly lit his earnest features from below and made him look harder and tougher than usual. “There’s a reactionary uprising in the Polish People’s Republic,” he answered. “The crypto-Fascists have been lying in wait, hoping for their chance. Now they think they’ve found it. They want to detach Poland from the roster of progressive states and bring back the squalid military dictatorship from the years of Pilsudski and Smigly-Ridz. But we won’t let them get away with it, will we?”

“No, Comrade Lieutenant!” the Red Army men chorused. Ihor made sure Kosior heard his voice. The less eager you really felt, the more eager you had to show yourself to be.

“ Khorosho. Ochen khorosho. I wouldn’t expect anything less from good Soviet men like you,” Kosior said. “Now I need to tell you, along with counterrevolutionary soldiers you may also find reactionary civilians they’ve seduced with their lying propaganda. Some of them may speak Russian. Pay no attention to anything they tell you. They’re in the pay of American and English spymasters. We liberated Poland from the German Fascists in the last war. Now we have to clear out the Polish Fascists who hid their venom till they thought they could hurt us the most.”

“We serve the Soviet Union!” the soldiers said as one.

They got to unroll their blankets and stretch out on the ground in Juterbog. That beat the devil out of trying to sleep sitting up in a truck bouncing along rough roads. After more bread and herrings and tea in the morning, they got rolling again. They were far enough inside the zone of Soviet control to make attack from the air only a small fear.

As soon as they got into Poland, the paving petered out and the road turned into a dirt track. They hadn’t gone far before Ihor, looking back through the opening in the canvas at the rear of the truck, saw a burnt-out T-34/85 in a field. It might have been sitting there since 1945. But that was about thirty tonnes of steel. They would have salvaged it between then and now…wouldn’t they? And the carcass looked fresh, not all rusty and dusty.

Bare-chested Red Army artillerymen served 105s and 155s in gun pits plainly just dug. The guns boomed. Cartridge cases jumped from the breeches. Loaders slammed in fresh rounds with fists clenched so they wouldn’t snag their fingers in the mechanism. Ihor remembered noticing that trick during the last war.

Then a machine gun opened up on the front of the column. It was an MG-34, the MG-42’s older and almost equally fearsome cousin. Maybe that meant the Poles using it were indeed Nazis. Or maybe it just meant they could get their hands on leftover German hardware.

Whatever it meant, Ihor’s truck jerked to a stop. “Out!” he said. “Out and down! We’ll hunt the fucker to death!”

Not fifteen seconds after the soldiers bailed out of the truck, a burst from the machine gun punched holes in the canvas cover-and, by the clanks, in the driver’s compartment and engine as well. Ihor cautiously raised his head a few centimeters as he dug in with his entrenching tool. Flashes came from behind some bushes in the meadow.

“There it is!” he yelled. “Riflemen, make the gunners keep their heads down. Submachine gunners, forward with me!” With his Kalashnikov, he could have hung back and fired from this longer distance. But the red stripe on each shoulder board told him he had to set an example.

Bullets cracked past him. He flopped down after his rush and squeezed off a short burst at the MG-34. The guys with PPDs and PPShs were firing, too, but they were too far away to have much chance of hitting anything. He wasn’t.

“Go home, you Russian pigs!” a Pole yelled. Ihor had no trouble following him. He wasn’t so sure the Great Russians could. The Pole sounded more Ukrainian than Russian. Maybe he’d come from eastern Poland when it turned into the western Ukraine after the revived Polish nation saw its borders shift several hundred kilometers westward.

“Keep going! Fire and move!” Lieutenant Kosior called. The veterans in the company already knew how. They’d done it before often enough. The machine gun didn’t have enough friends and couldn’t fire every which way at once. Before long, three dead Poles lay behind it.

“Murderers! Russian fucking bandits!” other Poles shouted. “Freedom for Poland! Freedom, damn you!”

“Death to the Fascists!” Lieutenant Kosior shouted back. Some people truly believed whatever their superiors told them.

He did succeed in infuriating the Poles who were trading fire with the Red Army men. “Fuck Stalin!” some of them yelled, while others shouted, “Death to Stalin!” One man added, “He’s a worse Fascist than Hitler ever was!”

“What are you bastards doing shooting Poles inside of Poland?” still other rebels called. “This is our country. It’s not yours. Go home!”

Ihor wouldn’t have minded. Only the certainty that an MGB man would put a bullet into the back of his neck without even smiling if he tried to abandon his post kept him banging away with his Kalashnikov-that and the equally grim certainty that the Poles would shoot him if he didn’t shoot them first.

“No one insults the great Stalin!” Stanislav Kosior dashed forward with his PPSh, as furious as if the Poles had cursed his mother, not his political boss. Then he spun and crumpled. He tried to drag himself back to cover. Two more bullets slammed into him and made his body jerk. He lay very still after that.

Another old German machine gun in Polish hands snarled to life. Ihor dug like a mole. These are our socialist allies, too he thought as the dirt flew. Christ have mercy if our enemies ever get this mad at us!