War Came Early 6 - Last Orders by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345524737
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

People who fought on the ground said the Germans were easier to push back than they ever had been. They’d pulled so much out of the Soviet Union to hold off England and France in the West that they didn’t always have enough left to keep the Red Army from going forward.

Anastas Mouradian only wished things were like that in the air war, too. The problem was, the air frontier above the Low Countries was narrow. The Luftwaffe had taken some planes out of the USSR to fight over there, but not all that many. Plenty of 109s and 190s still prowled the frigid air over the workers’ and peasants’ paradise.

“It will work out however it works out,” Isa Mogamedov said when Stas muttered about that in the cockpit. With the ground frozen hard, the Pe-2 squadron was back in business. Unfortunately, so were the Messerschmitts and the Focke-Wulfs.

“So it will,” Stas said, and sent the copilot and bomb-aimer a quizzical look. Mogamedov hadn’t quite come out with the Arabic Inshallah, but he’d come about as close as a secular New Soviet Man was ever likely to. A Russian probably wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary in the reply. Then again, Russians hadn’t spent the past nine hundred or a thousand years living next door to Azeris.

Groundcrew men used a truck-mounted starter—a device borrowed from the Americans—to make the bomber’s engines turn over: first the port, then the starboard. Mouradian studied the instrument panel. Everything looked the way it was supposed to. He waved to the boss sergeant on the airstrip. The noncom waved back.

One after another, the Pe-2s took off. The target today was one of the railroad lines leading west out of Minsk. Stas couldn’t remember hitting targets on the far side of the Byelorussian capital. Not in this phase of the war, anyhow.

He released the brakes and taxied down the dirt runway. The bomber got airborne and climbed over the pale-barked birch trees in the woods past the end of the airstrip. The birches looked as if they’d been whitewashed like the squadron’s planes. Any Nazi fighter pilot would have a hard time spotting the Soviet aircraft against the drifts below them.

As he got closer to the front east of Minsk, more monuments of man’s inhumanity to man made themselves known in spite of the snow. There was a burnt-out tank, with soot spread over whiteness. From this height, he couldn’t tell whose tank it had been. That didn’t matter any more. It was nothing but scrap metal now. Sooner or later, he supposed, the Russians would haul the carcass to a foundry and make something new out of it.

Here was a burning village that had been on the German side of the line for a long time but now found itself in Soviet hands once more. Stas couldn’t see any of the human dramas down there, either, but this scene had played out many times before farther east. Some of the peasants would have

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