Harry Turtledove - Fallout

“You’ll do, all right,” Gribkov said. “Just what you’ll do, I’m afraid to ask, but we’ll all find out, won’t we?”

The first thing Arzhanov did for the Tu-4 was guide the heavy bomber back to an airfield outside of Prague. As the dry run had given Boris confidence he would, he handled the short flight with unflustered competence.

Just getting away from the place where Leonid Tsederbaum decided the weight he carried was too much for his narrow shoulders came as a relief. Now they could get on with the war.

–

It was the middle of the night, moonless, cloudy, with spatters of warm July drizzle coming down every so often. It was dark as the inside of a concentration camp guard’s heart, except when guns and rocket launchers going off lit the clouds’ underside with brief, red, hellish glows.

It was, in other words, the perfect time for Gustav Hozzel to pull a sneak. He crawled through the shattered streets of Wesel, away from the blocks on the west side of town that the Germans and Americans still held and toward the Red Army’s positions. He didn’t tell his friends where he was going. He most especially didn’t tell his company CO. Max and Rolf would have tried to talk him out of it. Captain Nowak would have ordered him not to try such a harebrained stunt. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

A snake wouldn’t have lifted any higher off the ground than he did. He could feel the buttons on his tunic front scraping the asphalt as he wriggled along. The humid air stank of smoke-most of it the nasty, toxic kind that came from burnt paint and motor oil and fuel-and of death. Except during the coldest stretches of Russian winter, that spoiled-meat reek walked hand-in-hand with war.

More rain dripped from the heavens. That was good, and it was bad. The Ivans would have a harder time spotting him. But he might not hear or see approaching trouble till it arrived. Every few meters, he paused to look and listen before moving on. He wasn’t in a hurry. He just wanted to get back.

He had a bayonet in his right hand, a wire-cutter in his left. He hadn’t brought his PPSh. Firing it would be nothing but a kind of suicide. He’d scream to the whole world, or all of it that mattered, Here I am! Kill me!

The really scary thing was, he’d done worse sneaks than this. That one through the snow in southern Poland during the last winter of the old war…He’d come back with a fifteen-kilo ham, enough to let him and his buddies gorge for a couple of days instead of starving. He’d been a hero in his section-till the Russian steamroller started rolling again, anyhow.

He wouldn’t make his buddies fat this time. He did aim to make them jealous. Back and to the side of…was it this shattered building? Yes, sure enough-the apothecary’s shop.

Gustav started to go round the corner, then froze. Somebody was already crouching over what he craved. If another man from his own side had beaten him to it, more power to the sneaky bastard.

But that wasn’t somebody from his own side. Even as he watched, the Russian soldier started to drag his countryman’s corpse back toward the part of town the Reds held securely. Silent as a hunting hawk, Gustav set down the wire-cutter and eased up into a crouch. Then he sprang on the unsuspecting Ivan’s back.

His left palm covered the enemy soldier’s mouth. His strong left arm pulled the Russian’s head back. And the bayonet still in his right hand cut the man’s throat. The Russian gurgled desperately for most of a minute. He thrashed with ebbing strength till he went limp. Gustav held that hand over his mouth for an extra little while anyway. You didn’t get to be an old soldier by taking chances you didn’t have to.

So the Ivan was beyond doubt dead when Gustav slid him to the ground. He wasn’t what the German was after. The body he’d wanted to recover was. The afternoon before, Gustav had seen that that guy’d bought a plot in spite of his AK-47. Gustav had wanted one for a long time. This was his chance to get hold of one.

Part of the stock was still wet from the blood of the Ivan he’d just disposed of. Swearing silently, he wiped his hand on his trouser leg. But it wouldn’t be the first piece he’d carried that was bloodied in the literal sense of the word.

He frisked both dead Russians, and came up with five magazines for the assault rifle. They held thirty rounds apiece. That would keep him going for a little while, anyhow. If he couldn’t get more, he’d go back to the PPSh. He wouldn’t toss it just yet. He also discovered that one of the Ivans’ canteens was full of vodka. That was worth having, too.

“Now,” he said, shaping the words but not putting any sound behind them, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

Sometimes you got careless on the way back after you pulled a stunt like this. When you did, chances were you paid for it. Gustav took even more pains on his way back to his side’s chunk of Wesel than he had on his foray into the Red Army’s part of town.

The live Russians didn’t know he’d been and gone. Neither did the German pickets. That amused and worried him at the same time. What he’d done, some enterprising Ivan could imitate.

He curled up in his blanket and shelter half and went to sleep. He’d snored through plenty worse than this on-and-off drizzle. He slept so hard, Rolf had to shake him awake once it got light. As soon as he uncocooned himself, the ex-LAH man saw his new toy. “Where’d you get that ?” he demanded.

“Came in one of the cans from my last K-ration,” Gustav said, deadpan.

Rolf cussed him out in German, Russian, and what was probably Magyar. Then he calmed down. His gaze sharpened. “First one I’ve seen close up,” he said. “It looks just like a Sturmgewehr, doesn’t it? Except for the crappy wood stock, I mean. Even that banana-shaped magazine’s the same.”

Gustav had seen only a few of the German assault rifles during the last war. They were made from stamped metal and plastic: no wood at all. “You know how the Russians copy shit,” he said. “Monkey see, monkey do.” He pulled off the receiver. “Are the guts the same, too?”

Rolf bent over to examine the Soviet rifle’s working parts. He whistled softly between his teeth. “No. Not even close,” he said, his admiration grudging but real. “Our piece was a lot more complicated. This…This is about as simple as it can get and still work, looks like.”

“It does, yeah. Makes it easy to take care of, anyway. I like that,” Gustav said. The PPSh was the same way. It was far less elegant than a German Schmeisser, but much more robust. Come to think of it, you could say the same thing about the T-34 when you set it in the scales against German panzers.

“You’ve got blood on you,” Rolf remarked.

“It isn’t mine. There’d be more if God wasn’t pissing on us last night,” Gustav said.

“Ganz gut.” Rolf had heard enough to satisfy him. The only thing the Waffen -SS cared about was spilling the other guy’s blood.

Instead of eating K-rations for breakfast, they got last night’s stew reheated in a Goulaschkanone-Landser slang for a field kitchen. Barley, turnips, carrots, and bits of meat went down easy and put plenty of daub on the wattle of your ribcage.

They did if you got to finish them, anyhow. The Russians started early that morning, raining Katyushas down on the part of Wesel they hadn’t seized before Gustav had more than half-emptied his mess kit. He let the little tin basin and spoon fly any which way as he dove for the nearest muddy foxhole. Those rockets screaming in always made him want to piss his pants. The first Germans at whom the Ivans had aimed Katyushas ran like rabbits-the ones the bombardment didn’t kill, anyhow. If you wanted to flatten a square kilometer, a couple of launch racks’ worth of Katyushas were the next best thing to an A-bomb.