The War That Came Early: West and East Read Online Free PDF

copilot and bomb-aimer aboard Sergei’s SB-2 would end up in more trouble than he could hope to escape. An emotional Armenian, he couldn’t keep what he was thinking off his face.
    Enough propaganda. Just give us the mission and let us take care of it
. Something like that had to be in Stas’ mind. It was in Sergei’s mind, too, but he had sense enough not to show it. What nobody saw wouldn’t get reported to the NKVD.
    Of course, the NKVD could haul you away and shoot you or chuck you into a camp north of the Arctic Circle with no excuse at all. But why make things easy for the Chekists? If you gave them a reason to jump on you, you were almost asking for it, like a girl in tight clothes that didn’t cover enough of her.
    “Our target is the railroad line that runs southeast from Wilno to Molodetschna,” Colonel Borisov went on. Wilno to the Russians, Vilna to the Poles, Vilnius to the Lithuanians … one town with three names, depending on who was talking about it and who held it at any given moment. It was in Poland’s hands now. Marshal Smigly-Ridz had refused to give it back to the USSR. The Lithuanians also wanted it again, though they hadn’t ruled there for centuries.
    Sergei didn’t show annoyance, and he didn’t show relief, either. Whether he showed it or not, he felt it. They weren’t going to fly into East Prussia today. It wasn’t that the Germans didn’t have fighters and antiaircraft guns inside of Poland—they did. But they seemed much more serious about defending their own people than they did about protecting a bunch of Poles.
    “Questions?” Borisov asked.
    No one said anything. Borisov did not have a manner that encouraged queries. His face said,
Don’t waste my time
. Not all questions did waste time, but the ones that didn’t got asked no more than the ones that did.
    After the meeting broke up, Sergeant Ivan Kuchkov asked his superiors, “Well, how are they going to fuck us over this time?”
    “The railroad coming out of Wilno,” Sergei answered.
    “That won’t be so bad,” Kuchkov said. He was the bombardier, incharge of actually dropping the bombs on the enemy’s head. It took brute strength, and he had plenty. He was short and squat and muscular. He was also one of the hairiest human beings Sergei had ever seen. People called him “the Chimp,” but rarely to his face—you took your life in your hands if you did.
    “I was thinking the same thing,” Yaroslavsky said.
    “I was hoping the same thing,” Anastas Mouradian said, which sounded almost identical but meant something different.
    Most of the winter whitewash had been scrubbed off their SB-2. What was left gave the Tupolev bomber’s summer camouflage of brown and green an old, faded look. The SB-2 itself was starting to seem old and faded to Sergei. The two-engined machine had seemed a world-beater in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. It could outrun and outclimb the biplane fighters Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists and their Italian and German allies threw against it.
    But those days were long gone now. Sergei and his crewmates had fought as “volunteers” in Czechoslovakia. There, he’d made the unhappy discovery that the SB-2 was no match for the German Messerschmitt 109. Quite a few of his comrades who’d discovered the same thing didn’t come back to the
Rodina
. Bf-109s had done far too many of the Motherland’s flyers in this latest squabble with the Poles and Germans, too.
    Better bombers were supposed to be on the way. Till they arrived, the SB-2 soldiered on. It was what the Soviet Union had. If losses ran high … Well, they did, that was all. Factories could crank out more planes, and
Osoaviakhim
flight schools could crank out more pilots.
    Armorers wheeled bombs over to the plane. The carts didn’t sink into the ground, a sure sign the
rasputitsa
was done at last. “Here’s hoping they all land on the Hitlerites’ cocks,” Kuchkov said.
    “And the Poles’,” Sergei