Chapter 9

Sometimes you got the best view of things from the air. Sergei Yaroslavsky had always thought the Soviet General Staff would have done better to get up in a plane every once in a while to look at the battlefield as if it were a chessboard. Russian chess players amazed the world. So, sometimes, did the Red Army, but not in such a happy way.

Sergei had been pleased with what he saw before. In spite of help from the Luftwaffe, the forces belonging to Marshal Smigly-Ridz's reactionary clique weren't going to be able to hang on to Wilno, or to the terrain that led towards it from the USSR. That would have brought the Soviet border right up to the edge of Lithuanian territory, and would have set another pack of semifascists to quivering in their polished boots.

The mere idea of an independent Lithuania offended Sergei. The locals had taken advantage of the Soviet Union's weakness right after the Revolution to break away. If you thought you could get away with something like that for long, you needed to think again. Or you had needed to think again, till yesterday morning. Now, with the Wehrmacht marching side by side with the damned Poles, everything was as much up in the air as he was himself.

Up in the air, Sergei looked down on… what? The neat analogy of a chessboard didn't really suggest itself. What he saw lay somewhere between chaos and hell on earth. Pieces that had been taken-no, tanks and infantry units that had been smashed-weren't neatly lifted from the board. They lay as they had died, some sideways, some upside down, some still sending up black, stinking smoke, ant-small human bodies motionless among the murdered machines.

Anastas Mouradian was seeing the same thing as Sergei, and liking it every bit as well. "Doesn't look so good, does it?" the Armenian said with what struck Sergei as commendable restraint.

"Well… no." Sergei admitted what he couldn't very well deny. Most of the tanks wrecked or burning down there were Soviet T-26s and BT-7s. Most of the ant-small corpses lying near the tanks wore Red Army khaki.

By contrast, most of the tanks still on the move were painted dark gray. Most of the men moving forward with them-moving forward like army ants, ferocious, seemingly unstoppable-wore German Feldgrau. On the Nazis' flanks, Polish troops in dark khaki also advanced: jackals fattening themselves as lions tore chunks out of beasts too big for the yapping scavengers.

Paying too much attention to the fight on the ground wouldn't do. Sergei had feared German Bf-109s before. He'd had good reason to fear them, too. Now he had better reason: far more of them sharked through the air. They weren't just helping the Poles any more. They were supporting their own countrymen, a job they took much more seriously. Yaroslavsky tried to look every which way at once. He wished some kindly quartermaster would have issued him eyes in the back of his head, and maybe one on top as well.

Mouradian pointed ahead, towards a clump of camouflaged tents whose long morning shadows revealed them for what they were. "That looks like a headquarters, don't you think?" he said. "Regimental, maybe divisional."

"Da." Sergei nodded. "Shall we make the Germans jump and shout?" He smiled at the idea of Nazis in monocles and caps with upswept crowns running for cover like ordinary mortals-and maybe finding out just how mortal they were.

When he shouted an alert through the speaking tube to Ivan Kuchkov, he found that the Chimp also liked the idea. "We'll bomb the living shit out of the fuckers," Kuchkov shouted back. He approved of any mayhem that didn't come down on his own head. Come to that, so did Sergei.

He flew straight toward the tent. Anastas Mouradian peered through the bombsight, giving minute course corrections with gestures. Then Mouradian also shouted to Kuchkov: "Now, Ivan!"

Down whistled the bombs. Without waiting to see what they'd done, Sergei wrestled the SB-2 around and got out of there at full throttle. The Germans wouldn't appreciate the visit he'd just paid them, and they had ways of making their displeasure known.

The wing's new airstrip lay well within what had been Polish territory, the better to keep pounding Wilno. Flying south against the Germans instead of west hadn't been what his superiors planned for, but the wing could do it when the situation required.

Getting back… Sergei hadn't worried about getting back. By all the signs, neither had anyone else on the Soviet side. That only went to show that the higher-ups didn't know what all they should have worried about. He watched two 109s hack an SB-2 out of the sky. No chutes came from the stricken bomber as it plunged to the ground. Three dead Soviet airmen, then. He ground his teeth. If they came after him next, there were liable to be three more.

But they didn't. They zoomed back to the south instead. The 109's only weakness he'd been able to find was its short range. If these fighters needed to gas up again… Sergei wouldn't complain. He knew a moment's pity for his countrymen who hadn't been so lucky.

When he got down, the airstrip was boiling like a pot of shchi forgotten over a roaring fire. Sergei hadn't even climbed down from the bomber's wing before a groundcrew man waved for him to get back into the cockpit. "What?" he said. "Why?"

"Because we're getting the fuck out of here, Comrade, that's why," the groundcrew man said.

"Why?" Sergei asked again, still not moving.

Before the groundcrew man could answer, the outside world did it for him: shells burst only a few hundred meters from the edge of the airstrip. "That's why, Comrade Pilot," the noncom said. "The German sons of bitches'll have the range on us any minute now. D'you want to get blown up?"

"They were nowhere near us when we took off," Sergei protested. He looked at his watch, pushing back fur-lined gloves and sleeves to see the face. No, it really hadn't been much more than an hour earlier.

"Yeah, well"-the groundcrew man shrugged-"the cocksuckers are fucking well near us now." He sounded almost as foul as the Chimp. "And if we don't haul ass right this minute, we'll get to meet 'em in person, like. So quit dicking around and head for the motherland, right?"

"Right," Sergei said dully, not knowing what else to do. He turned around-and almost bumped into Anastas Mouradian, who was right behind him. "Back in the plane, Stas. Back to Byelorussia."

"I heard," Mouradian said. "It's not so good, is it?" More shells screamed in. These burst closer than the ones in the last volley had. If the SB-2 didn't take off soon, it wouldn't get the chance.

Sergei thought about fighting the Nazis as an untrained infantryman. He thought about trying to get back to Byelorussia on foot-or, if he was very lucky, in the back of a truck. Much too easy to think about a German tank, or maybe a Stuka swooping down from above, pumping machine-gun bullets into the back of a truck.

Off to Byelorussia it was, then, and now, too. "Not so good, no," Sergei said. They returned to the cockpit and snapped their belts closed. Sergei had to tell Ivan Kuchkov what was going on.

"Happy motherfucking day," Kuchkov answered. "The stupid pricks who're supposed to be running things screwed it up royally this time, didn't they?"

"It could be better." Sergei left it right there. The engines, which had barely stopped, fired up again right away. That was something, anyhow-not much, but something. The SB-2 bounced down the runway and took off. It felt uncommonly agile; he couldn't remember the last time he'd gone up without a full bomb load.

He had to swing back to the east and come over the airstrip again to head for Soviet territory. Shells were dropping on the dirt runway by then. Any of the planes still hiding in revetments would have a devil of a time getting away. Sergei wondered if groundcrew men would have to set them on fire to keep the Germans from grabbing them. He also wondered whether any groundcrew men were hanging around to take care of such things. Trucks kicked up tall plumes of dust as they hightailed it toward the old border.