Reincarnations

"Well done, Nikita Sergeyevich," Tolbukhin said.

"I’ve given plenty of traitors what they deserve," Khrushchev answered. "I know how. And it’s always a pleasure."

"Yes," Tolbukhin said: of course a commissar would see a traitor where he saw a whore. "We’ll have to move faster now, though; the racket will draw the fascists. Nichevo. We’d have bumped into another Nazi patrol in a minute or two, anyway."

One thing the racket did not do was bring people out of their flats to join the Eighth Guards Army in the fight against the fascist occupiers. As the soldiers ran, they shouted, "Citizens of Zaporozhye, the hour of liberation is at hand!" But the city had seen a lot of war. Civilians left here were no doubt cowering under their beds, hoping no stray bullets from either Soviet or German guns would find them.

"Scouts forward!" Tolbukhin shouted as his men turned south from Metallurgov onto Pravdy Street. They were getting close to their objective. The fascists surely had guards in the area-but where? Finding them before they set eyes on the men of the Eighth Guards Army could make the difference between triumph and disaster.

Then the hammering of gunfire broke out to the south. Khrushchev laughed out loud. "The Nazis will think they are engaging the whole of our force, Fedor Ivanovich," he said joyfully. "For who would think even the Phantom dared divide his men so?"

Tolbukhin ran on behind the scouts. The Nazis were indeed pulling soldiers to the south to fight the fire there, and didn’t discover they were between two fires till the Eighth Guards Army and, moments later, the men of the Fifth Shock Army and the Fifty-first Army opened up on them as well. How the Hitlerites howled!

Ahead of him, a German machine gun snarled death- -till grenades put the men handling it out of action. Then, a moment later, it started up again, this time with Red Army soldiers feeding it and handling the trigger. Tolbukhin whooped with glee. An MG-42 was a powerful weapon. Turning it on its makers carried the sweetness of poetic justice.

One of his soldiers pointed and shouted: "The objective! The armory! And look, Comrade General! Some of our men are already inside. We have succeeded."

"We have not succeeded yet," Tolbukhin answered. "We will have succeeded only when we have done what we came here to do." He raised his voice to a great shout: "Form a perimeter around the building. Exploitation teams, forward! You know your assignments."

"Remember, soldiers of the Soviet Union, the motherland depends on your courage and discipline," Khrushchev added.

As Tolbukhin had pla

Inside the armory, German efficiency came to the aid of the Soviet Union. The Nazis had arranged weapons and ammunition so their own troops could lay hold of whatever they needed as quickly as possible. The men of the Red Army happily seized rifles and submachine guns and the ammunition that went with each. They also laid hands on a couple of more MG-42’s. If they could get those out of the city, the fascists would regret it whenever they tried driving down a road for a hundred kilometers around.

"When you’re loaded up, get out!" Tolbukhin shouted. "Pretty soon, the Nazis will hit us with everything they’ve got." He did not disdain slinging a German rifle on his back and loading his pockets with clips of ammunition.

"We have routed them, Fedor Ivanovich," Khrushchev said. When Tolbukhin did not reply, the political commissar added, "A million rubles for your thoughts, Comrade General."

Before the war, the equivalent sum would have been a kopeck. Of course, before the war Tolbukhin would not have called the understrength regiment he led a front. Companies would not have been styled armies, nor sections divisions. "Inflation is everywhere," he murmured, and then spoke to Khrushchev: "Since you’ve come in, Nikita Sergeyevich, load up, and then we’ll break away if we can, if the Germans let us."

Khrushchev affected an injured look. "Am I then only a beast of burden, Fedor Ivanovich?"

"We are all only beasts of burden in the building of true Communism," Tolbukhin replied, relishing the chance to get off one of those sententious bromides at the political commissar’s expense. He went on, "I am not too proud to load myself like a beast of burden. Why should you be?"

Khrushchev flushed and glared furiously. In earlier days-in happier days, though Tolbukhin would not have thought so at the time- -upbraiding a political commissar would sure have caused a denunciation to go winging its way up through the Party hierarchy, perhaps all the way to Stalin himself. So many good men had disappeared in the purges that turned the USSR upside down and inside out between 1936 and 1938: Tukhashevsky and Koniev, Yegorov and Blyukher, Zhukov and Uborevich, Gamarnik and Fedko. Was it any wonder the Red Army had fallen to pieces when the Nazis attacked in May 1941?

And now, in 1947, Khrushchev was as high-ranking a political commissar as remained among the living. To whom could he denounce Tolbukhin? No one, and he knew it. However furious he was, he started filling his pockets with magazines of Mauser and Schmeisser rounds.

Sometimes, Tolbukhin wondered why he persisted in the fight against the fascists when the system he served, even in its tattered remnants, was so onerous. The answer was not hard to find. For one thing, he understood the difference between bad and worse. And, for another, he’d been of general’s rank when the Hitlerites invaded the motherland. If they caught him, they would liquidate him-their methods in the Soviet Union made even Stalin’s seem mild by comparison. If he kept fighting, he might possibly-just possibly-succeed.

Khrushchev clanked when turning back to him. The tubby little political commissar was still glaring. "I am ready, Fedor Ivanovich," he said. "I hope you are satisfied."

"Da," Tolbukhin said. He hadn’t been satisfied since Moscow and Leningrad fell, but Khrushchev couldn’t do anything about that. Tolbukhin pulled from his pocket an officer’s whistle and blew a long, furious blast. "Soldiers of the Red Army, we have achieved our objective!" he shouted in a great voice. "Now we complete the mission by making our departure!"

He was none too soon. Outside, the fascists were striking heavy blows against his perimeter teams. But the fresh men coming out of the armory gave the Soviets new strength and let them blast open a corridor to the east and escape.

Now it was every section-every division, in the grandiose language of what passed for the Red Army in the southern Ukraine these days-for itself. Inevitably, men fell as the units made their way out of Zaporozhye and onto the steppe. Tolbukhin’s heart sobbed within him each time he saw a Soviet soldier go down. Recruits were so hard to come by these days. The booty he’d gained from this raid would help there, and would also help bring some of the bandit bands prowling the steppe under the operational control of the Red Army. With more men, with more guns, he’d be able to hurt the Nazis more the next time.

But if, before he got out of Zaporozhye, he lost all the men he had now… What then, Comrade General? he jeered at himself.

Bullets cracked around him, spattering off concrete and striking blue sparks when they ricocheted from metal. He lacked the time to be afraid. He had to keep moving, keep shouting orders, keep turning back and sending another burst of submachine-gun fire at the pursuing Hitlerites.

Then his booted feet thudded on dirt, not on asphalt or concrete any more. "Out of the city!" he cried exultantly.