Nobody was screaming his head off. That was good, to say nothing of lucky. They’d flattened out soon enough, and none of the shards of steel and brass decided to skim the ground and bite somebody regardless.

A couple of Czech soldiers started to get to their feet. “Stay down!” Sergeant Benjamin Halevy shouted from right behind Jezek. “They may not be done with us.”

Sure as hell, another volley came in half a minute later. One Czech swore and hissed like a viper, but only one. Bright red blood steamed in the snow under his leg. It didn’t look like a bad wound-but then, any wound you didn’t get yourself wasn’t so bad.

As the injured man bandaged around, Vaclav twisted around (trying his best to stay flat while he did it) and told the sergeant, “You may be a Jew, but at least you’re a smart Jew.”

“Fuck you, Jezek,” Halevy answered evenly. “If I’m so smart, what am I doing here?” He was redheaded and freckle-faced. He was a French noncom, not a Czech. His folks had brought him from Prague to Paris when he was little. Equally fluent in Czech and French, he served as a liaison between the government-in-exile’s troops and his host country’s army.

Before the war started, Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews. But, in Czechoslovakia and now here, he’d seen that you could count on them to fight the Nazis with everything they had. Anybody who’d do that was all right in his book. Plenty of Slovaks had thrown down their rifles and hugged the first German they saw. Slovakia was “independent” these days, though the next time Father Tiso did anything Germany didn’t like would be the first.