Off in the distance, something howled. “A wolf!” Bagnall said, and grabbed for his rifle before he realized there was no immediate need. Wolves had been hunted out of England for more than four hundred years, but he reacted to the sound by instinct printed on his flesh by four hundred times four hundred generations.
“We’re rather a long way from home, aren’t we?” Whyte said with a nervous chuckle; he’d started at the wolf call, too.
“Too bloody far,” Bagnall said. Thinking about England brought him only pain. He tried to do it as little as he could. Even battered and hungry from war, it felt infinitely more welcoming than wrecked Pskov, tensely divided between Bolsheviks and Nazis, or than this forbidding primeval wood.
In amongst the trees, the almost eternal ravening wind was gone. That let Bagnall grow as nearly warm as he’d been since his Lancaster landed outside Pskov. And Jerome Jones had said the city was known for its mild climate. Trudging through snow as spring began gave the lie to that, at least if you were a Londoner. Bagnall wondered if spring ever truly began here.
Alf Whyte said, “What precisely is our mission, anyhow?”
“I was talking with a Jerry last night.” Bagnall paused, and not just to take another breath. He had a little German and no Russian, so he naturally found it easier to talk with the Wehrmacht men than with Pskov’s rightful owners. That bothered him. He was so used to thinking of the Germans as enemies that dealing with them in any way felt treasonous, even if they loved the Lizards no better than he.
“And what did the Jerry say, pray tell?” Whyte asked when he didn’t go on right away.
Thus prompted, Bagnall answered, “There’s a Lizard … I don’t know what exactly—forward observation post, little garrison, something—about twenty-five kilometers south of Pskov. We’re supposed to put paid to it.”
“Twenty-five kilometers?” As a navigator, Whyte was used to going back and forth between metric and imperial measures. “We’re to hike fifteen miles through the snow and then fight? It’ll be nightfall by the time we get there.”
“I gather that’s part of the plan,” Bagnall said. Whyte’s scandalized tone showed what an easy time England had had in the war. The Germans and, from what Bagnall could gather, the Russians took the hike for granted: just one more thing they had to do. They’d done worse marches to get at each other the winter before.
He munched cold black bread as he shuffled along. While he paused to spend a penny against the trunk of a birch tree, a Lizard jet wailed by, far overhead. He froze, wondering if the enemy could have spotted the advancing human foes. The trees gave good cover, and most of the fighters wore white smocks over the rest of their clothes. Even his own helmet had whitewash splashed across it.
The leaders of the combat group (or so his German of the night before had called it) took no chances. They hurried the fighters along and urged them to scatter even more widely than before. Bagnall obeyed, but worried. He’d thought nothing could be worse than fighting in these grim woods. But suppose he got lost in them instead? The shiver that brought had nothing to do with cold.
On and on and on. He felt as if he’d marched a hundred miles already. How was he to fight after a slog like this? The Germans and Russians seemed to think nothing of it. A British Tommy might have felt the same, but the RAF let machines carry warriors to combat. In a Lanc, Bagnall could do things no infantry could match. Now, quite literally, he found the shoe on the other foot.
The sun swung through the sky. Shadows lengthened, deepened. Somehow, Bagnall kept up with everyone else. As shadows gave way to twilight, he saw the men ahead of him going down on their bellies, so he did, too. He slithered forward. Through breaks in the forest he saw a few houses—huts, really—plopped down in the middle of a clearing. “That’s it?” he whispered.
“How the devil should I know?” Ken Embry whispered back. “Somehow, though, I don’t think we’ve been invited here for high tea.”
Bagnall didn’t think the village had ever heard of high tea. By its look, he wondered if it had heard of the passing of the tsars. The wooden buildings with carved walls and thatched roofs looked like something out of a novel by Tolstoy. The only hint of the twentieth century was razor wire strung around a couple of houses. No one, human or Lizard, was in sight.
“It can’t be as easy as it looks,” Bagnall said.
“I’d like it if it were,” Embry answered. “And who says it can’t? We—”
Off in the distance a small pop! interrupted him. Bagnall had been involved in dropping countless tons of bombs and had been on the receiving end of more antiaircraft fire than he cared to think about, but this was the first time he’d done his fighting on the ground. The mortar fired again and again, fast as its crew—Bagnall didn’t know whether they were Russians or Germans—could serve it with bombs.
Snow and dirt fountained upward as the mortar rounds hit home. One of the wooden houses caught fire and began to burn merrily. Men in white burst from the trees and dashed across the clearing. Bagnall wondered if the village really was a Lizard outpost after all.
He fired the Mauser, worked the bolt, fired again. He’d trained on a Lee-Enfield, and vastly preferred it to the weapon he was holding. Instead of angling down to where it was easy to reach, the Mauser’s bolt stuck straight out, which made quick firing difficult, and the German rifle’s magazine held only five rounds, not ten.
Other rifles started hammering, and a couple of machine guns, too. Still no response came from the village. Bagnall began to feel almost, sure they were attacking a place empty of the enemy. Relief and rage fought in him—relief that he wasn’t in danger after all, rage that he’d made that long, miserable march in the snow.
Then one of the white-cloaked figures flew through the air, torn almost in two by the land mine he’d stepped on. And then muzzle flashes began winking from a couple of the village buildings as the Lizards returned fire. The charging, yelling humans began to go down as if scythed.
Bullets kicked up snow between Bagnall and Embry, whacked into the trees behind which they hid. Bagnall hugged the frozen earth like a lover. Shooting back was the last thing on his mind. This was, he decided in an instant, a much uglier business than war in the air. In the Lanc, you dropped your bombs on people thousands of feet below. They shot back, yes, but at your aircraft, not at your precious and irreplaceable self. Even fighter aircraft didn’t go after you personally—their object was to wreck your plane, and your gunners were trying to do the same to them. And even if your aircraft got shot down, you might bail out and survive.
It wasn’t machine against machine here. The Lizards were doing their best to blow large holes in his body so he’d scream and bleed and die. Their best seemed appallingly good, too. Every one of however many Lizards there were in the village had an automatic weapon that spat as much lead as one of the raiders’ machine guns and many times as much as a bolt-action rifle like his Mauser. He felt like Kipling’s Fuzzy-Wuzzy charging a British square.
But you couldn’t charge here, not if you felt like living. The Russians and Germans who’d tried it were most of them down, some chewed to bits by a hail of bullets, others shredded like the first luckless fellow by stepping on a mine. The few still on their feet could not go forward. They fled for the shelter of the woods.
Bagnall turned to Embry, shouted, “I think we just stuck our tools in the meat grinder.”
“Whatever gave you that idea, dearie?” Even in the middle of battle, the pilot managed to come up with a high, shrill falsetto.
In the gathering gloom, one of the houses in the village began to move. At first Bagnall rubbed his eyes, wondering if they were playing tricks on him. Then, after Mussorgsky, he thought of the Baba Yaga, the witch’s hut that ran on chicken’s legs. But as the wooden walls fell away, he saw that this house moved on tracks. “Tank!” he screamed. “It’s a bleeding tank!”
The Russians were yelling the same thing, save with a broad a rather than his sharp one. The Germans screa
med “Panzer!” instead. Bagnall understood that, too. He also understood that a tank—no, two tanks now, he saw—meant big trouble.
Their turrets swiveled toward the heaviest firing. Machine guns opened up on them as they did so; streams of bullets struck sparks from their armor. But they’d been made to withstand heavier artillery than most merely Earthly tanks commanded—the machine guns might as well have been firing feathers.
Their own machine guns started shooting, muzzle flashes winking like fireflies. One of the raiders’ machine guns—a new German one, with such a high cyclic rate that it sounded like a giant ripping an enormous canvas sail when it opened up—abruptly fell silent. It started up again a few seconds later. Bagnall admired the spirit of the men who had taken over for its surely fallen crew.
Then the main armament of one of the tanks spoke, or rather bellowed. From less than half a mile away, it sounded to Bagnall like the end of the world, while the tongue of flame it spat put him in mind of hellmouth opening. The machine gun stopped firing once more, and this time did not open up again.
The other tank’s cannon fired, too, then slowed so it pointed more nearly in Bagnall’s direction. He scrambled deeper into the woods: anything to put more distance between himself and that hideous gun.
Ken Embry was right with him. “How the devil do you say, ‘Run like bloody hell!’ in Russian?” he asked.
“Not a phrase I’ve learned, I’m afraid, but I don’t believe the partisans need our advice in that regard,” Bagnall answered. Russians and Germans alike were in full retreat, the tanks hastening on their way—and hastening too many of them into the world to come—with more cannon rounds. Shell splinters and real splinters blown off trees hissed through the air with deadly effect.
“Someone’s reconnaissance slipped up badly,” Embry said. “This was supposed to be an infantry outpost. No one said a word about going up against armor.”
Bagnall only grunted. What Embry had said was self-evidently true. Men were dying because of it. His main hope at present was not being one who did. Through the crash of the cannon, he heard another noise, one he didn’t recognize: a quick, deep thutter that seemed to come out of the air.
“What’s that?” he said. Beside him, Embry shrugged. The Russians were running faster than ever, crying “Vertolyet!” and “Avtozhir!” Neither word, unfortunately, meant anything to Bagnall.
Fire came out of the sky from just above treetop height: streaks of flame as if from a Katyusha launcher taken aloft and mounted on a flying machine instead of a truck. The woods exploded into flame as the rocket warheads detonated. Bagnall shrieked like a lost soul, but couldn’t even hear himself.
Whatever had fired the rockets, it wasn’t an ordinary airplane. It hung in the sky, hovering like a mosquito the size of a young whale, as it loosed another salvo of rockets on the humans who had presumed to attack a Lizard position. More deadly shrapnel flew. Buffeted, half stunned by the blast, Bagnall lay flat on the ground, as he might have during a great earthquake, and prayed the pounding would end.
But another helicopter came whickering up from the south and poured two more salvos of rockets into the raiders’ ranks. Both machines hovered overhead and raked the fqrest with machine-gun fire. The tanks came crashing closer, too, smashing down everything that stood in their way but the bigger trees.
Somebody booted Bagnall in the backside, hard. “Get up and run, you bloody twit!” The words were in English. Bagnall turned his head. It was Ken Embry, his foot drawn back for another kick.
“I’m all right,” Bagnall said, and proved it by getting up. As soon as he was on his pins again, adrenaline made him run like a deer. He fled north—or, at any rate, away from the tanks and the helicopters’ killing ground. Embry matched him stride for desperate stride. Somewhere in their mad dash, Bagnall gasped out, “Where’s Alf?”
“He bought his plot back there, I’m afraid,” Embry answered.
That hit Bagnall like—like a machine-gun round from one of the deathships up there, he thought. Watching Russians and Germans he didn’t know getting shot or blown to bits was one thing. Losing someone from his own crew was ten times worse—as if a flak burst had torn through the side of his Lancaster and slaughtered a bombardier. And since Whyte was—had been—one of the three other men in Pskov with whom he could speak freely, he felt the loss all the more.
Bullets still slashed the woods, most of them, though, behind the fleeing Englishmen now. The Lizards’ tanks did not press the pursuit as aggressively as they might have. “Maybe they’re afraid of taking a Molotov cocktail from someone up a tree whom they don’t spy till too late,” Embry suggested when Bagnall said that out loud.
“Maybe they are,” the flight engineer said. “I’m damned sure I’m afraid of them.”
The gunfire and rockets and cannon rounds had left his ears as dazed as any other part of him. Dimly, as if from far away, he heard screams of terror and the even more appalling shrieks of the wounded. One of the helicopters flew away, then, after a last hosing of the woods with bullets, the other one. Bagnall looked down at his wrist. The glowing hands of his watch said only twenty minutes had gone by since the first shots were fired. Those twenty minutes of hell had stretched for an eternity. Though not ordinarily a religious man, Bagnall wondered how long a real eternity of hell would seem to last.
Then his thoughts snapped back to the present, for he almost stumbled over a wounded Russian lying in a pool of blood that looked black against the snow at night. “Bozhemoi,” the Russian moaned. “Bozhemoi.”
“My God,” Bagnall gasped, unconsciously translating. “Ken, come over here and help me. It’s a woman.”
“I hear.” The pilot and Bagnall stooped beside the wounded partisan. She pressed a hand against her side, trying to stanch the flow of blood.
As gently as he could, Bagnall undid her quilted coat and tunic so he could see the wound. He had to force her hand away before he could bandage it with gauze from his aid kit. She groaned and thrashed and weakly tried to fight him off. “Nemtsi,” she wailed.
“She thinks we’re Jerries,” Embry said. “Here, give her this, too.” He pressed a morphia syrette into Bagnall’s hand.
Even as he made the injection, Bagnall thought it a waste of precious drug: she wasn’t going to live. Her blood had already soaked the bandage. Maybe a hospital could have saved her, but here in the middle of a frozen nowhere … “Artzt!” he yelled in German. “Gibt es Artzt hier? Is there a doctor here?”
No one answered. He and Embry and the wounded woman might have been alone in the woods. She sighed as the morphia bit into her pain, took a couple of easy breaths, and died.
“She went out peacefully, anyhow,” Embry said; Bagnall realized the pilot hadn’t thought she’d make it, either. He’d done her the last favor he could by freeing her death from agony.
Bagnall said, “Now we have to think about staying alive ourselves.” In the middle of the cold woods, after a crushing defeat that showed only too clearly how the Lizards had seized and held great stretches of territory from the mightiest military machines the world had known, that seemed to require considerable thought.
Liu Han called, “Come and see the foreign devil do amazing things with stick and ball and glove. Come and see! Come and see!”
Mountebanks of all sorts could be sure of an audience in the Chinese refugee camp. Behind her, Bobby Fiore tossed into the air the leather-covered ball he’d had made. Instead of catching it in his hands, he tapped it lightly with his special stick—a bat, he called it. The ball went a couple of feet into the air, came straight down. He tapped it up again and again and again. All the while, he whistled a merry tune.
“See!” Liu Han pointed to him. “The foreign devil juggles without using his hands!”
A spattering of applause came from the crowd. Three or four people tossed coins into the bowl that lay by Liu Han’s feet. Some others set rice cakes and vegetables on the mat next to the bowl. Everyone understood that enterta
iners had to eat or they wouldn’t be able to entertain.
When no donations came for a minute or so, Bobby Fiore tapped the ball up one last time, caught it in his free hand, and glanced toward Liu Han. She looked out into the crowd and said, “Who will play a game where, if he wins, the foreign devil will look ridiculous? Who will try this simple game?”
Several men shouted and stepped toward her. Nothing delighted Chinese more than making a European or American into an object of ridicule. Liu Han pointed toward the bowl and the mat: if they wanted to play, they had to pay. A couple of them made their offerings without a word, but one asked belligerently, “What is this game?”
Bobby Fiore handed her the ball. She held it up in one hand, bent to pick up a flat canvas bag stuffed with rags which she displayed in the other. Then she put the bag back on the ground, gave the ball to the belligerent man. “A simple game, an easy game,” she said. “The foreign devil will stand well back and then run toward the bag. All you have to do is stand in front of it and touch him with the ball before he reaches it. Win and you get back your stake and twice as much besides.”
“That is easy.” The man with the ball puffed out his chest and tossed a silver trade dollar into the bowl. It rang sweetly. “I will put the ball on him, no matter what he does.”
Liu Han turned to the crowd. “Clear a path, please. Clear a path so the foreign devil can run.” Chattering among themselves, the people moved aside to form a narrow lane. Bobby Fiore walked down it. When he was almost a hundred feet from the man with the ball, he turned and bowed to him. The arrogant fellow did not return his courtesy. A couple of people clucked reproachfully at that, but most didn’t think a foreign devil deserved much courtesy.
Bobby Fiore bowed again, then ran straight at the man with the ball. The Chinese man clutched it in both hands, as if it were a rock. He set himself for a collision as Fiore bore down on him.
But the collision never came. At the last instant, Fiore threw himself to the ground on his hip and thigh and hooked around the clumsy lunge the man made with the ball. His foot came down on the stuffed bag. “Safe!” he yelled in his own language.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 91