Diebner ran a hand through his thinning, slicked-back hair. “They have also been doing it rather longer than we have, Colonel. Haste was our undoing. You know the phrase festina lente?”
“Make haste slowly.” In his Gymnasium days, Jäger had done his share of Latin.
“Just so. It’s generally good advice, but not advice we can afford at this stage of the war. We must have those bombs to fight the Lizards. The hope was that, if the reaction got out of hand, throwing a lump of cadmium metal into the heavy water of the pile would bring it back under control. This evidently proved too optimistic. And also, if I remember the engineering drawings correctly, there was no plug to drain the heavy water out of the pile and so shut down the reaction that way. Most unfortunate.”
“Especially to everyone who was working on the pile at the time,” Jäger said. “If you know all this, Dr. Diebner, and you’ve told it to the authorities, why are they still questioning everyone else, too?”
“First, I suppose, to confirm what I say—and I do not know everything that led up to the disaster, because I was out of town. And also, more likely than not, to find someone on whom to lay the blame.”
That made sense to Jäger; after all, he’d been trying to escape being that someone. The Wehrmacht played games with assigning responsibility for maneuvers that didn’t work, too. Another old saying crossed his mind: “Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” That wasn’t true any more; these days, the powers that be launched a paternity suit to pin a failure on somebody. The results weren’t always just, but he suspected they weren’t supposed to be.
The Gestapo major came out, probably to find out why Diebner hadn’t gone in. He scowled to discover two of his subjects talking with each other. Jäger felt guilty, then angry at the secret policeman for intimidating him. He stomped out of the waiting room—and almost bumped into a big man who was just coming in. “Skorzeny!” he exclaimed.
“So they dragged you into the net, too, did they?” the scarfaced SS colonel said. “They’re going to rake me over the coals even though, as far as I know, I’ve never been within a hundred kilometers of the little pissant town where the screw-up happened. Some major’s supposed to grill me in five minutes.”
“He’s running late,” Jäger said. “He just got done with me and started in on one of the physicists. Want to go someplace and drink some schnapps? Nothing much else to do around here.”
Skorzeny slapped him on the back. “First good idea I’ve heard since they hauled me back here, by God! Let’s go—even if the schnapps they’re making these days tastes like it’s cooked from potato peelings, it’ll put fire in your belly. And I was hoping I’d run into you, as a matter of fact. I’m working on a scheme where you just might fit in very nicely.”
“Really?” Jäger raised an eyebrow. “How generous of the SS to look kindly on a poor but honest Wehrmacht man—”
“Oh, can the shit,” Skorzeny said. “You happen to know things that would be useful to me. Now let’s go get those drinks you were talking about. After I ply you with liquor, I’ll try seducing you.” He leered at Jäger.
“Ahh, you only want me for my body,” the panzer man said.
“No, it’s your mind I crave,” Skorzeny insisted.
Laughing, the two men found a tavern down the street from Gestapo headquarters. The fellow behind the bar wore uniform, as did just about everyone in Berchtesgaden these days. “Even the whores here are all kitted out with field-gray panties,” Skorzeny grumbled as he and Jäger took a table in the dimly lit cave. He raised his snifter in salute, knocked back his schnapps, and made a horrible face. “God, that’s vile.”
Jäger also took a healthy nip. “It is, isn’t it?” But warmth did spread out from his belly. “It’s got the old antifreeze in it, though, no doubt about that.” He leaned forward. “Before you jump on me, I’m going to pick your brain: what sort of goodies are they fishing out of that tank you stole? I want to pretend I’m still a panzer man, you see, not a physicist or a bandit like you.”
Skorzeny chuckled. “Flattery gets you nowhere. But I’ll talk—why the hell not? Half of it I don’t understand. Half of it nobody understands, which is part of the problem: the Lizards build machines that are smarter than the people we have trying to figure out what they do. But there’ll be new ammunition coming down the line by and by, and new armor, too—layers of steel and ceramic bonded together the devil’s uncle only knows how.”
“You served on the Russian front, all right,” Jäger said. “New ammunition, new armor—that’s not bad. One day I may even get to use them. Probably not one day soon, though, eh?” Skorzeny did not deny it. Jäger sighed, finished his shot, went back to the bar for another round, and returned to the table. Skorzeny pounced on the fresh drink like a tiger. Jäger sat down, then asked, “So what is this scheme you have that involves me?”
“Ah, that. You were going to be an archaeologist before the first war sucked you into the Army, right?”
“You’ve been poking through my records,” Jäger said without much malice. He drank more schnapps. It didn’t seem so bad now—maybe the first shot had stunned his taste buds. “What the devil does archaeology have to do with the price of potatoes?”
“You know the Lizards have Italy,” Skorzeny said. “They’re not as happy there as they used to be, and the Italians aren’t so happy with them, either. I had a little something to do with that, getting Mussolini out of the old castle where they’d tucked him away for safekeeping.” He looked smug. He’d earned the right, too.
“You’re planning to go down there again, and you want me along?” the panzer colonel asked. “I’d stick out like a sore thumb—not just my looks, mind you, but I don’t speak much Italian.”
But Skorzeny shook his massive head. “Not Italy. The Lizards are messing about on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, over in Croatia. I have trouble stomaching Ante Pavelic, but he’s an ally, and we don’t want the Lizards getting a toehold over there. You follow so far?”
“The strategy, yes.” Jäger didn’t say that he marveled at an SS man’s having trouble stomaching anything. Word had trickled through the Wehrmacht that the Croat allies, puppets, whatever you wanted to call them, took their fascism—to say nothing of their blood feuds—very seriously indeed. Maybe Skorzeny’s admission was proof of that. Jäger went on, “I still don’t see what it has to do with me, though.”
Skorzeny looked like a fisherman trying out a new lure. “Suppose I were to tell you—and I can, because it’s true—the main Lizard base in Croatia is just outside Split. What would that mean to you?”
“Diocletian’s palace,” Jäger answered without a moment’s hesitation. “I even yisited there once, on holiday eight or ten years ago. Hell of an impressive building, even after better than sixteen hundred years.”
“I know you visited; the report you wrote probably went into the operational planning for Operation Strafgericht. Strafgericht indeed; we punished the Yugoslavs properly for ducking out of their alliance with us. But that’s by the way. What counts is that you know the area, and not just from that visit but from study as well. That’s why I say you could be very useful to me.”
“You’re not planning on blowing up the palace, are you?” Jäger asked with sudden anxiety. Monuments suffered in wartime; that couldn’t be helped. He’d seen enough Russian churches in flames during Barbarossa, but a Russian church didn’t carry the same weight for him as a Roman Emperor’s palace.
“I will if I have to,” Skorzeny said. “I understand what you’re saying, Jäger, but if you’re going to let that kind of attitude hold you back, then I’ve made a mistake and you’re the wrong fellow for the job.”
“I may be anyhow. I’ve got a regiment waiting for me south of Belfort, remember.”
“You’re a good panzer man, Jäger, but you’re not a genius panzer man,” Skorzeny said. “The regiment will do well enough under someone else. For me, though, your special knowledge would truly come
in handy. Do I tempt you, or not?”
Jäger rubbed his chin. He had no doubt Skorzeny could cut through the chain of command and get him reassigned: he’d pulled off enough coups for the brass to listen to him. The question was, did he want to go on fighting the same old war himself or try something new?
“Buy me another schnapps,” he said to Skorzeny.
The SS colonel grinned. “You want me to get you drunk first, so you can say you didn’t know what I was doing when I had my way with you? All right, Jäger, I’ll play.” He strode to the bar.
Lieutenant General Kurt Chill turned a sardonic eye on his Soviet opposite numbers—or maybe, George Bagnall thought, it was just the effect the torches that blazed in the Pskov Krom created. But no, the general’s German was sardonic, too: “I trust, gentlemen, we can create a united front for the defense of Pleskau? This would have been desirable before, but cooperation has unfortunately proved limited.”
The two Russian partisan leaders, Nikolai Vasiliev and Aleksandr German, stirred in their seats. Aleksandr German spoke Yiddish as well as Russian, and so followed Chill’s words well enough. He said, “Call our city by its proper name, not the one you Nazis hung on it. Cooperation? Ha! You at least had that much courtesy before.”
Bagnall, whose German was imperfect, frowned as he tried to keep track of the Jewish partisan leader’s Yiddish. Vasiliev had no Yiddish or German; he had to wait until an interpreter finished murmuring in his ear. Then he boomed “Da!” and followed it up with a spate of incomprehensible Russian.
The interpreter performed his office: “Brigadier Vasiliev also rejects the use of the term ‘united front.’ It is properly applied to unions of progressive organizations, not associations with reactionary causes.”
Beside Bagnall, Jerome Jones whistled under his breath. “He shaded that translation. ‘Fascist jackals’ is really what Vasiliev called the Nazis.”
“Why does this not surprise me?” Bagnall whispered back. “If you want to know what I think, that they’ve come back to calling each other names instead of trying to kill each other is progress.”
“Something to that,” Jones said.
He started to add more, but Chill was speaking again: “If we do not join together now, whatever the name of that union may be, what we call this city will matter no more. The Lizards will give it their own name.”
“And how do we stop that?” As usual, German got his comment in a beat ahead of Vasiliev.
The Russian partisan leader amplified what his comrade had said: “Yes, how do we dare put our men on the same firing line as yours without fearing they’ll be shot in the back?”
“The same way I dare put Wehrmacht men into line alongside yours,” Chill said: “by remembering the enemy is worse. As for being shot in the back, how many Red Army units went into action with NKVD men behind them to make sure they were properly heroic?”
“Not our partisans,” German said. Then he fell silent, and Vasiliev had nothing to add, from which Bagnall inferred General Chill had scored a point.
Chill folded his arms across his chest. “Does either of you gentlemen propose to take overall command of the defenses of Pleskau—excuse me, Pskov?”
Aleksandr German and Vasiliev looked at each other. Neither seemed overjoyed at the prospect of doing as Chill had suggested. In their valenki, Bagnall wouldn’t have been overjoyed, either. Conducting hit-and-run raids from the forest wasn’t the same as fighting a stand-up campaign. The partisans knew well how to make nuisances of themselves. They also had to be uneasily aware that partisan warfare hadn’t kept the Germans from Pskov or driven them out of it.
Finally, Vasiliev said, “Nyet.” He went on through his interpreter. “You are best suited to lead the defense, provided you do it so that you are defending the town and the people and the Soviet fighters in the area as well as your own Nazis.”
“If I defend the area, I defend all of it, or as much as I can with the men and resources I have available,” Chill answered. “This also means that if I give an order to one of your units, I expect it to be obeyed.”
“Certainly,” Vasiliev answered, “so long as the unit’s commander and political commissar judge the order to be in the best interest of the cause as a whole, not just to the advantage of you Germans.”
“That is not good enough,” Chill replied coldly. “They must take the overall well-being as their governing assumption, and obey whether they see the need or not. One of the reasons for having an overall commander is to have a man in a position where he can see things his subordinates do not.”
“Nyet,” Vasiliev said again. Aleksandr German echoed him.
“Oh, bugger, here we go again,” Bagnall whispered to Jerome Jones. The radarman nodded. Bagnall went on, “We’ve got to do something, before we go through another round of the idiocy that had the Bolshies and Nazis blazing away at each other a few weeks ago. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy getting stuck between them again.”
“Nor I,” Jones whispered back. “If that’s what the ground-pounders call war, thank God for the RAF, is all I have to say.”
“You get no arguments from me,” Bagnall said. “Remember, I’d already found that out. You weren’t along for the raid on the Lizard base south of here.” They thought you were too valuable to risk, he thought without much rancor. Ken and poor dead Alf and I, we were expendable, but not you—you know your radars too well.
As if thinking along similar lines, Jones answered, “I tried to come along. The bloody Russians wouldn’t let me.”
“Did you? I didn’t know that.” Bagnall’s opinion of Jones went up a peg. To volunteer to get shot at when you didn’t have to took something special.
As most Englishmen would, Jones brushed that aside. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. We have to worry about now, as you said.” He got up and said loudly, “Tovarishchi!” Even Bagnall knew that one—it meant Comrades! Jones went on, in Russian and then in German, “If we want to hand Pskov to the Lizards on a silver platter, we can go on just as we are now.”
“Yes? And so?” Kurt Chill asked. “What is your solution? Shall we all place ourselves under your command?” His smile was hard and bright and sharp, like a shark’s.
Jones turned pale and sat down in a hurry. “I’ve got a picture of that, I do, bloody generals kowtowing to a radarman. Not flipping likely.”
“Why not?” Bagnall got to his feet. He had only German, and not all he wanted of that, but he gave it his best shot: “The Red Army doesn’t trust the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht doesn’t trust the Red Army. But have we English done anything to make either side distrust us? Let General Chill command. If Russian units don’t like what he proposes, let them complain to us. If we think the orders are fair, let them obey as if the commands came from Stalin. Is that a fair arrangement?”
Silence followed, save for the murmur of Vasiliev’s interpreter as he translated Bagnall’s words. After a few seconds, Chill said, “In general, weakening command is a bad idea. A commander needs all the authority over his troops he can get. But in these special circumstances—”
“The Englishmen would have to decide quickly,” Aleksandr German said. “If they cannot make up their minds, orders may become irrelevant before they give their answer.”
“That would be part of the packet,” Bagnall agreed.
“The Englishmen would also have to remember that we are all allies together here against the Lizards, and that England is not specially aligned with the Russians against the Reich,” Lieutenant General Chill said. “Decisions which fail to show this evenhandedness would make the arrangement unworkable in short order—and we would start shooting at each other again.”
“Yes, yes,” Bagnall said impatiently. “If I didn’t think we could do that, I wouldn’t have advanced the idea. I might also say I’m not the only one in this room who has had trouble remembering we are all allies together and that plans should show us much.”
Chill glared at him, but so did German and
Vasiliev. Jerome Jones whispered, “You did well there, not to single out either side. This way each of them can pretend to be sure you’re talking about the other chap. Downright byzantine of you, in fact.”
“Is that a compliment?” Bagnall asked.
“I meant it for one,” the radarman answered.
Chill spoke to the Russian partisan leaders. “Is this agreeable to you, gentlemen? Shall we let the Englishmen arbitrate between us?”
“He rides that ‘gentlemen’ hard,” Jones murmured. “Throws it right in the face of the comrades—just to irk ’em, unless I miss my guess. Gentlemen don’t fit into the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Bagnall listened with but half an ear. He was watching the two men who’d headed the “forest republic” before the Lizards arrived. They didn’t look happy as they muttered back and forth. Bagnall didn’t care whether they were happy. He just hoped they could live with the arrangement.
Finally, grudgingly, Nikolai Vasiliev turned to General Chill and spoke a single sentence of Russian. The translator turned it into German: “Better the English than you.”
“On that, if you reverse roles, we agree completely,” Chill said. He turned to Bagnall, gave him an ironic bow. “Congratulations. You and your British colleagues have just become a three-man board of field marshals. Shall I order your batons and have a tailor sew red stripes to your trouser seams?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Bagnall said. “What I need is assurance from you and from your Soviet counterparts that you’ll abide by whatever decisions we end up making. Without that, we might as well not start down this road.”
The German general gave him a long look, then slowly nodded. “You do have some understanding of the difficulties with which you are involving yourself. I wondered if this was so. Very well, let it be as you say. By my oath as a soldier and officer of the Wehrmacht and the German Reich, I swear that I shall accept without question your decision on cases brought before you for arbitration.”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 118