“Isn’t that wonderful?” By Embry’s tone, it was anything but.
The cold hit like a blow in the face when the aircrew left the Lanc. They were an abbreviated lot, pilot, flight engineer (Bagnall doubled as radioman), navigator, and radarman. No bomb-aimer on this run, no bombardiers, and no gunners in the turrets. If a Lizard jet attacked, machine guns weren’t going to be able to reply to its cannon and rockets.
“Zdrast’ye,” Ken Embry said, thereby exhausting his Russian. “Does anyone here speak English?”
“I do,” two men said, one with a Russian accent, the other in Germanic tones. They looked suspiciously at each other. Some months of joint battle against a common foe had not eased the memory of what they’d been doing to each other before the Lizards came.
Bagnall had done some German before he left college to join the RAF. That was only three years ago, but already most of it had vanished from his brain. Like most undergraduates taking German, he’d come upon Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language.” That he remembered, especially the bit about sooner declining two beers than one German adjective. And Russian was worse—even the alphabet looked funny.
To Bagnall’s surprise, Jerome Jones started speaking Russian—halting Russian, but evidently good enough to be understood. After a brief exchange, he turned back to the air crew and said, “He—Sergei Leonidovich Morozkin there, the chap who knows a bit of English—says we’re to accompany him to the Krom, the local strongpoint, I gather.”
“By all means let us accompany him, then,” Embry said. “I didn’t know you had any Russian, Jones. The chaps who put this mission together had a better notion of what they were about than I credited them for.”
“I doubt that, sir,” Jones said, unwilling to give RAF higher-ups any credit for sense. But he had reason on his side: “When I was at Cambridge, I was interested for a while in Byzantine history and art, and that led me to the Russians. I hadn’t the time to do them properly, but I did teach myself a bit of the language. That wouldn’t be in any of my papers, though, so no one would have known of it.”
“Good thing it’s so, all the same,” Bagnall said, wondering if Jones was a Bolshevik himself. Even if he was, it didn’t matter now. “My German is villainous, but I was about to trot it out when you spoke up. I wasn’t what you’d call keen on trying to speak with our Soviet friends and allies in the language of a mutual foe.”
The German who spoke English said, “Against the Eidechsen—I am sorry, I do not know your word; the Russians call them Yashcheritsi—against the invaders from the sky, no men are foes to one another.”
“Against the Lizards, you mean,” Bagnall and Embry said together.
“Lizards.” Both the German and Morozkin, the anglophone Russian, echoed the word to fix it in their minds; it was one that would be used a good deal in days to come. The German went on, “I am Hauptmann—Captain auf Englisch, ja?—Martin Borcke.”
As soon as the men of the aircrew had introduced themselves in turn, Morozkin said, “Come to Krom now. Get away from airplane.”
“But the radar—” Jones said plaintively.
“We do. Is in box, da?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Come,” Morozkin said again. At the far end of the airstrip—a long, hard slog through cold and snow—three-horse sleighs waited to take the Englishmen into Pskov. Their bells jangled merrily as they set off, as if in a happy winter song. Bagnall would have found the journey more enjoyable had his Russian driver not had a rifle slung across his back and half a dozen German potato-masher grenades stuffed into his belt.
Pskov had been built in rings where two rivers came together. The sleigh slid past churches and fine houses in the center of town, many bearing the scars of fighting when the Germans had taken it from the Soviets and when the Lizards struck north.
Closer to the joining of the two streams were a marketplace and another church. In the market, old women with scarves around their heads sold beets, turnips, cabbages. Steam rose from kettles of borscht. People queued up to get what they needed, not with the good spirits Englishmen displayed on similar occasions but glumly, resignedly, as if they could expect nothing better from fate.
Guards prowled the marketplace to make sure no one even thought of turning disorderly. Some were Germans with rifles and coal-scuttle helmets, many still wearing field-gray greatcoats. Others were Russians, carrying everything from shotguns to military rifles to submachine guns, and dressed in a motley mixture of civilian clothes and khaki Soviet uniform. Everyone, though—Germans, Russians, even the old women behind their baskets of vegetables—wore the same kind of thick felt boot.
The sleigh driver had on a pair, too. Bagnall tapped the fellow on the shoulder, pointed at the footgear. “What do you call those?” He got back only a smile and a shrug, and regretfully tried German: “Was sind sie?”
Comprehension lit the driver’s face. “Valenki.” He rattled off a couple of sentences in Russian before he figured out Bagnall couldn’t follow. His German was even slower and more halting than the flight engineer’s, which gave Bagnall a chance to understand it: “Gut—gegen—Kalt.”
“Good against cold. Thanks. Uh, danke. Ich verstehe.” They nodded to each other, pleased at the rudimentary communication. The valenki looked as if they’d be good against cold; they were thick and supple, like a blanket for the feet.
The sleigh went past a square with a monument to Lenin and then, diagonally across from it, another onion-domed church. Bagnall wondered if the driver was conscious of the ironic juxtaposition. If he was, he didn’t let on. Letting on that you noticed irony probably wasn’t any safer in the Soviet Union than in Hitler’s Germany.
Bagnall shook his head. The Russians had become allies because they were Hitler’s enemies. Now the Russians and Germans were both allies because they’d stayed in the ring against the Lizards. They still weren’t comfortable company to keep.
The horses began to strain as they went uphill toward the towers that marked old Pskov. As the beasts labored and the sleigh slowed, Bagnall grasped why the fortress that was the town’s beginning had been placed as it was: the fortress ahead, which he presumed to be the Krom, stood on a bluff protected by the rivers. The driver took him past the tumbledown stone wall that warded the landward side of the fortress. Some of the tumbling down looked recent; Bagnall wondered whether Germans or Lizards were to blame.
The sleigh stopped. Bagnall climbed out. The driver pointed him toward one of the towers; its witches’-hat roof had had a bite taken out of it. A German sentry stood to one side of the doorway, a Russian to the other. They threw the doors wide for Bagnall.
As soon as he stepped over the threshold, he felt as if he’d been taken back through time. Guttering torches cast weird, flickering shadows on the irregular stonework of the wall. Up above, everything was lost in gloom. In the torchlight, the three fur-clad men who sat at a table waiting for him, weapons in front of them, seemed more like barbarian chieftains than twentieth-century soldiers.
Over the next couple of minutes, the other Englishmen came in. By the way they peered all around, they had the same feeling of dislocation as Bagnall. Martin Borcke pointed to one of the men at the table and said, “Here is Generalleutnant Kurt Chill, commander of the 122nd Infantry Division and now head of the forces of the Reich in and around Pskov.” He named the RAF men for his commander.
Chill didn’t look like Bagnall’s idea of a Nazi lieutenant general: no monocle, no high-peaked cap, no skinny, hawknosed Prussian face. He was on the roundish side and badly needed a shave. His eyes were brown, not chilly gray. They had an ironic glint in them as he said in fair English, “Welcome to the blooming gardens of Pskov, gentlemen.”
Sergei Morozkin nodded to the pair who sat to Chill’s left. “Are leaders of First and Second Partisan Brigades, Nikolai Ivanovich Vasiliev and Aleksandr Maksimovich German.”
Ken Embry whispered to Bagnall, “There’s a name I’d not fancy having in Soviet Russia th
ese days.”
“Lord, no.” Bagnall looked at German. Maybe it was the steel-rimmed spectacles he wore, but he had a schoolmasterly expression only partly counteracted by the fierce red mustache that sprouted above his upper lip.
Vasiliev, by contrast, made the flight engineer think of a bearded boulder: he was short and squat and looked immensely strong. A pink scar—maybe a crease from a rifle bullet—furrowed one cheek and cut a track through the thick, almost seallike pelt that grew there. A couple of inches over and the partisan leader would not have been sitting in his chair.
He rumbled something in Russian. Morozkin translated: “He bid you welcome to forest republic. This we call land around Pskov while Germans rule city. Now with Lizards”—Morozkin pronounced the word with exaggerated care—“here, we make German-Soviet council—German-Soviet soviet, da?” Bagnall thought the play on words came from the interpreter; Vasiliev, even sans scar, would not have seemed a man much given to mirth.
“Pleased to meet you all, I’m sure,” Ken Embry said. Before Morozkin could translate, Jerome Jones turned his words into Russian. The partisan leaders beamed, pleased at least one of the RAF men could speak directly to them.
“What is this thing you have brought for the Soviet Union from the people and workers of England?” German asked. He leaned forward to wait for the answer, not even noticing the ideological preconceptions with which he’d freighted his question.
“An airborne radar, to help aircraft detect Lizard planes at long range,” Jones said. Both Morozkin and Borcke had trouble turning the critical word into their native languages. Jones explained what a radar set was and how it did what it did. Vasiliev simply listened. German nodded several times, as if what the radarman said made sense to him.
And Kurt Chill purred, “You have, aber natürlich, also brought one of these radar sets for the Reich?”
“No, sir,” Embry said. Bagnall started to sweat, though the room in this drafty old medieval tower was anything but warm. The pilot went on, “Our orders are to deliver this set and the manuals accompanying it to the Soviet authorities at Pskov. That is what we intend to do.”
General Chill shook his head. Bagnall sweated harder. No one had bothered to tell the RAF crew that Pskov wasn’t entirely in Soviet hands. Evidently, the Russians who’d told the English where to fly the set hadn’t thought there would be a problem. But a problem there was.
“If there is only one, it shall go to the Reich,” Chill said.
As soon as Sergei Morozkin translated the German’s English into Russian, Vasiliev snatched up the submachine gun from the table in front of him and pointed it at Chill’s chest. “Nyet,” he said flatly. Bagnall needed no Russian to follow that.
Chill answered in German, which Vasiliev evidently understood. It also let Bagnall understand some of what was going on. The Nazi had courage, or at least bravado. He said, “If you shoot me, Nikolai Ivanovich, Colonel Schindler takes command—and we are still stronger around Pskov than you.”
Aleksandr German did not bother gesticulating with the pistol on the table. He simply spoke in a dry, rather pedantic voice that went well with his eyeglasses. His words sounded like German, but Bagnall had even more trouble with them than he had in following Kurt Chill. He guessed the partisan was actually speaking Yiddish. To stay up with that, they should have kept David Goldfarb as crew radarman.
Captain Borcke made sense of it. He translated: “German says the Wehrmacht is stronger around Pskov than Soviet forces, yes. He asks if it is also stronger than Soviet and Lizard forces combined.”
Chill spoke a single word: “Bluff.”
“Nyet,” Vasiliev said again. He put down his weapon and beamed at the other partisan leader. He’d found a threat the Germans could not afford to ignore.
Bagnall did not think it was a bluff, either. Germany had not endeared itself to the people of any of the eastern lands it occupied before the Lizards came. The Jews of Poland—led by, among others, a cousin of Goldfarb’s—had risen against the Nazis and for the Lizards. The Russians might do the same if this Chill pushed them hard enough.
He might, too. Scowling at the two partisan brigadiers, he said, “You may do this. The Lizards may win a victory through it. But this I vow: neither of you will live long enough to collaborate with them. We will have that radar.”
“Nyet.” This time Aleksandr German said it. He switched back to Yiddish, too fast and harsh for Bagnall to follow. Captain Borcke again did the honors: “He says this set was sent to the workers and people of the Soviet Union to aid them in their struggle against imperialist aggression, and that surrendering it would be treason to the Soviet state.”
Communist rhetoric aside, Bagnall thought the partisan was dead right. But if Lieutenant General Chill didn’t, the flight engineer’s opinion counted for little.
And Chill was going to be hard-nosed about it. Bagnall could see that. So could everyone else in the tower chamber. Captain Borcke edged away from the RAF air crew to one side, Sergei Morozkin to the other. Both men slid a hand under their coats, presumably to grab for pistols. Bagnall got ready to throw himself flat.
Then, instead, he hissed at Jerome Jones: “You have the manuals and such for the radar, am I right?”
“Of course,” Jones whispered back. “Couldn’t very well come without them, not when the Russians are going to start making them for themselves. Or they will if anyone comes out of this room alive.”
“Which doesn’t look like the best wager in the world. How many sets have you got?”
“Of the manuals and drawings, you mean? Just the one,” Jones said.
“Bugger.” That put a crimp in Bagnall’s scheme, but only for a moment. He spoke up in a loud voice: “Gentlemen, please!” If nothing else, he succeeded in distracting the Germans and partisans from the bead they were drawing on each other. Everyone stared at him instead. He said, “I think I can find a way out of this dispute.”
Grim faces defied him to do it. Trouble was, he realized suddenly, the Germans and Russians really wanted to have a go at each other. In English, Kurt Chill said, “Enlighten us, then.”
“I’ll do my best,” Bagnall answered. “There’s only the one radar, and no help for that. If you hijack it, word will get back to Moscow—and to London. Cooperation between Germany and her former foes will be hampered, and the Lizards will likely gain more from that than the Luftwaffe could from the radar. Is this so, or not?”
“It may be,” Chill said. “I do not think, though, there is much cooperation now, when you give the Russians and not us this set.” Captain Borcke nodded emphatically at that.
There was much truth in what the German general said. Bagnall was anything but happy about sharing secrets with the Nazis, and his attitude reflected that of British leaders from Churchill on down. But setting the Wehrmacht and the Red Army back at each other’s throats wasn’t what anyone had had in mind, either.
The flight engineer said, “How is this, then? The radar itself and the manuals go on toward Moscow as planned. But before they do”—he sighed—“you make copies of the manuals and send them to Berlin.”
“Copies?” Chill said. “By photograph?”
“If you have that kind of equipment here, yes.” Bagnall had been thinking of doing the job by hand; Pskov struck him as a burnt-out backwater town. But who could say what sort of gear the division intelligence unit of the 122nd Infantry—or whatever other units were in the area—had available?
“I’m not sure the higher-ups back home would approve, but they didn’t anticipate this situation,” Ken Embry murmured. “As for me, I’d say you’ve managed to saw the baby in half. King Solomon would be proud.”
“I hope so,” Bagnall said.
Sergei Morozkin was still translating his suggestion for the partisan leaders. When he finished, Vasiliev turned to Aleksandr German and said with heavy humor, “Nu, Sasha?” It had to be more Yiddish—Bagnall had heard that word from David Goldfarb.
Aleksandr German
peered through his spectacles at Chill the German. Having Goldfarb in the aircrew for a while had made Bagnall more aware of what the Nazis had done to Eastern European Jews than he otherwise would have been. He wondered what went on behind German’s poker face, how much hatred seethed there. The partisan did not let on. After a while, he sighed and spoke one word: “Da.”
“We shall do this, then.” If Chill was enthusiastic about Bagnall’s plan, he hid it very well. But it gave him most of what he wanted, and kept alive the fragile truce around Pskov.
As if to underline how important that was, Lizard jets streaked overhead. When bombs began to fall, Bagnall felt something near panic: a hit anywhere close by would bring all the stones of the Krom down on his head.
Through the fading wail of the Lizards’ engines and the ground-shaking crash of the bombs came the rattle of what sounded like every rifle and submachine gun in the world going off at once. Pskov’s defenders, Nazis and Communists alike, did their best to knock down the Lizards’ planes.
As usual, their best was not good enough. Bagnall listened hopefully for the rending crash that would have meant a fighter-bomber destroyed, but it never came. He also listened for the roar that would warn of a second wave of attackers. That didn’t come, either.
“Anyone would think that flying more than a thousand miles would take us out of the bloody blitz,” Alf Whyte complained.
“They called it a world war even before the Lizards came,” Embry said.
Nikolai Vasiliev shouted something at Morozkin. Instead of translating it, he hurried away to return a few minutes later with a tray full of bottles and glasses. “We drink to this—how you say?—agreement,” he said.
He was pouring man-sized slugs of vodka for everyone when a partisan burst in, shouting in Russian. “Uh-oh,” Jerome Jones said. “I didn’t catch all of that, but I didn’t care for what I understood.”
Morozkin turned to the RAF air crew. “I have—bad news. Those—how you say?—Lizards, they bomb your plane. Is wreck and ruin—is that what you say?”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 81