The War That Came Early: West and East by Harry Turtledove Page A

“we’re finally starting to get somewhere.”
    “Oh, yes.” Anastas Mouradian nodded. If he was anywhere near as pleased as Sergei, he hadn’t bothered telling his face about it. “Somewhere. But where?”
    “We’ve got the Poles on the run.” Sergei almost shouted, to make himself heard over the drone of the SB-2’s twin radial engines. “It took a while, but now we do. A week from now, we won’t just be bombing Wilno. We’ll be shelling it—see if we won’t. The Poles are brave, but that only helps so much when you haven’t got the horses—or when the horses are all you’ve got.”
    Mouradian nodded again. He’d heard the same stories Sergei had: about how Polish cavalrymen, square-topped
csapkas
on their heads and drawn sabers gleaming in the sun, had charged Red Army tanks. You did have to be brave to do something like that. Didn’t you also have to be outof your mind? Not many of the Poles who’d galloped forward galloped back again.
    “All right. Fine. We have the Poles on the run. Now what?” Mouradian said after what seemed a pause for consideration. His Russian was fluent, but carried a throaty Armenian accent. He sounded a little like Stalin on the radio. Sergei thought so, anyhow, but Mouradian got offended when the Russian told him so. If you listened to Stas, Armenian and Georgian were nothing like each other. But, if you listened to him explaining that, he still sounded like Stalin.
    He also took a perverse—a Caucasian?—pride in being difficult. “What do you mean, ‘Now what?’” Sergei said. “We take back the chunk of Poland Pilsudski stole from us while we were fighting our civil war, that’s what.”
    “And what do the Poles do then?” Anastas inquired. “Better yet, what do the Germans do then?”
    The Germans couldn’t do what Sergei suggested. Human beings weren’t made that way. Mouradian chuckled indulgently, as he might have at a six-year-old showing off. Sergei went on, “But who cares what they do? If the Poles make peace with us, the Nazis have to get out of Poland, right?”
    “They’re good at marching into places. They aren’t so good at marching out again,” Stas said, which was bound to be true. He added, “Besides, they’re still at war with us any which way. They have been since Czechoslovakia.”
    “Well, so what?” Sergei didn’t like to think about Czechoslovakia. He and Stas and Ivan Kuchkov had come out again, which a lot of other “volunteers” hadn’t. He’d first made the acquaintance of the Bf-109 there. If he never saw another angular German fighter, he wouldn’t be sorry.
    “So Hitler will find some other way to keep the fight going,” Mouradian predicted. “He hates the Soviet Union worse than he hates France and England.”
    That held a nasty ring of truth. Yaroslavsky was glad to have to pay attention to his flying for a little while as he descended toward this new airstrip on what had been Polish soil. “He may hate us, but is he crazy?” he asked, leveling off again. “Does he
want
a two-front war?”
    “Germany almost won the last one,” Anastas answered, which was true even if unpalatable. “And it doesn’t look like America’s going to get into this one.”
    Sergei’s grunt could have been taken as one of effort, because he was cranking down the landing gear. A hydraulic or electrical system would have been easier on the pilot. It also would have been more expensive and harder to build. He—and every other SB-2 pilot—went on working the crank.
    Without American soldiers and munitions, France and England likely would have lost the World War—the First World War, it was now. That didn’t make Soviet citizens love the USA. American troops in the north and the Far East had done their best to strangle the Russian Revolution in its cradle. They’d gone home, grudgingly, only after their best turned out not to be good enough.
    The bomber set down roughly and taxied to a stop. Groundcrew men trotted up as the