By then, Bagnall had had a bellyful of frantic Russians. He’d even had a bellyful of frantic Germans, a species that did not exist in stereotype but proved quite common under the stress of combat. He got to his feet, knocked the gun barrel aside with a contemptuous swipe, and growled, “Why don’t you shove that thing up your arse—or would you rather I did it for you?”
He spoke in English, but the tone got across. So did his manner. The Red Army man stopped treating him like a servant and started treating him like an officer. The old saw about the Hun being either at your throat or at your feet seemed to apply even more to Russians than it did to Germans. If you gave in to them, they rode roughshod over you, but if you showed a little bulge, they figured you had to be the boss and started tugging at their forelocks.
Bagnall turned to Jerome Jones. “What’s this bloody goon babbling about? I have more Russian than I did when we got stuck here—not hard, that, since I had none—but I can’t make head nor tail of it when he goes on so blinking fast.”
“I’ll see if I can find out, sir,” Jones answered. The radarman had spoken a little Russian before he landed in Pskov; after several months—and no doubt a good deal of intimate practice with the fair Tatiana, Bagnall thought enviously—he was pretty fluent. He said something to the Russian soldier, who shouted and pointed to the map on the wall.
“The usual?” Bagnall asked.
“The usual,” Jones agreed tiredly: “wanting to know if his unit should conform to General Chill’s orders and pull back from the second line to the third one.” He switched back to Russian, calmed down the soldier, and sent him on his way. “They’ll obey, even if he is a Nazi. They probably should have obeyed two hours ago, before Ivan there came looking for us, but, God willing, they won’t have taken too many extra casualties for being stubborn.”
Bagnall sighed. “When I proposed this scheme, I thought we’d get only the serious business.” He made a face. “I was young and naive—I admit it.”
“You’d damned well better,” said Ken Embry, who was pouring himself a glass of herb-and-root tea from a battered samovar on the opposite side of the gloomy room in the Pskov Krom. “You must have thought being tsar came with the droit de seigneur attached.”
“Only for Jones here,” Bagnall retorted, which made the radarman stammer and cough. “At the time, I remember thinking two things. First was to keep the Nazis and Bolshies from bashing each other so the Lizards wouldn’t have themselves a walkover here.”
“We’ve managed that, for the moment, anyhow,” Embry said. “If the Lizards committed more tanks to this front, we’d have a dry time of it, but they seem to have decided they need them elsewhere. They get no complaints from me on that score, I assure you.”
“Nor from me,” Bagnall said. “They’re quite enough trouble as is.”
“There’s fighting on the outskirts of Kaluga, the wireless reports,” Jerome Jones said. “That’s not far southwest of Moscow, and there’s damn all between it and Red Square. Doesn’t sound what you’d call good.”
“No, that’s bad,” Embry agreed. “Makes me glad so many of the fighters here are partisans—locals—and not regular-army types recruited from God knows where. If you’re fighting for your own particular home, you’re less likely to want to pack it in if Moscow falls.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, but I dare say you’re right,” Bagnall answered, “even if it is a most unsocialist thing to say.”
“What, that you’re gladder to fight for your own property? Well, I’m a Tory from a long line of Tories, and I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it,” Embry said. “All right, George, you didn’t want the Russians and the Jerries to go at each other. What was the other notion in what passes for your mind as to why we needed this particular headache?”
“After that raid on the Lizards’ outpost, I had a serious disinclination toward infantry combat, if you must know,” Bagnall said. “What of you?”
“Well, I must admit that, given the choice between another stint of it and ending up in the kip with that barmaid in Dover we all knew, I’d be likely to choose Sylvia,” Embry said judiciously. “I do believe, however, that we perform a useful function here. If we didn’t, I’d feel worse about not shouldering my trusty rifle and going out to do or die for Holy Mother Russia.”
“Oh, quite,” Bagnall agreed. “Keeping the Germans and the Soviets from each other’s throats isn’t the least contribution we could make to the war effort in Pskov.”
Lizard planes roared low overhead. Antiaircraft guns, mostly German, threw shells into the air at them, adding to the racket that pierced the Krom’s thick stone walls. None of the antiaircraft guns was stationed very close to Pskov’s old citadel. The ack-ack wasn’t good enough to keep the Lizards from hitting just about anything they wanted to hit, and drew their notice to whatever it tried to protect. Bagnall approved of not having their notice drawn to the Krom: being buried under tons of rock was not the way of shuffling off this mortal coil he had in mind.
Lieutenant General Kurt Chill stalked into the room, followed by Brigadier Aleksandr German, one of the chiefs of what had been the partisan Forest Republic until the Lizards came. Both men looked furious. They had even more basic reasons than most in Pskov for disliking and distrusting each other: it wasn’t just Wehrmacht against Red Army with them, it was Nazi against Jew.
“Well, gentlemen, what seems to be the bone of contention now?” Bagnall asked, as if the disagreements in Pskov were over the teams to pick for a football pool rather than moves that would get men killed. Sometimes that detached tone helped calm the excited men who came for arbitration.
And sometimes it didn’t. Aleksandr German shouted, “This Hitlerite maniac won’t give me the support I need. If he doesn’t send some men, a lot of the left is going to come apart. And does he care? Not even a little bit. As long as he can keep his precious troops intact, who cares what happens to the front?”
Bagnall could barely follow the partisan brigadier’s fast, guttural Yiddish. It was close enough to German for Chill to have no trouble understanding it, though. He snapped, “The man is a fool. He wants me to commit elements of the 122nd Antitank Battalion to an area where no panzers are opposing his forces. If I send the battalion piecemeal into fights which are not its proper province, none of it will be left when it is most desperately needed, as it will be.”
“You’ve got those damned 88s,” Aleksandr German said. “They aren’t just antitank guns, and we’re getting chewed up because we don’t have any artillery to answer the Lizards.”
“‘Let’s look at the situation map,” Bagnall said.
“We’ve had to fall back here and here,” Aleksandr German said, pointing. “If they force a crossing of this stream, we’re in trouble, because they can nip in toward the center and start rolling up the line. We’re holding there for now, but God knows how long we can keep doing it without some help—which Herr General Chill won’t give us.”
Chill pointed at the map, too. “You have Russian units here you can draw on for reinforcements.”
“I have bodies, God knows,” Aleksandr German said, and then was seized by a coughing fit as he realized he’d twice invoked a deity he wasn’t supposed to believe in. He wiped his mouth on a sleeve and went on, “Bodies won’t do the job by themselves, though. I need to break up the Lizards’ concentrations back of their lines.”
“It’s a wasteful use of antitank troops,” Chill said.
“I’ve been wasting Russians—why should your pampered pets be any different?” Aleksandr German retorted.
“They are specialists, and irreplaceable,” the Wehrmacht man replied. “If we expend them here, they will not be available when and where their unique training and equipment are truly essential.”
Aleksandr German slammed a fist against the map. “They are essential now, in the place where I requested them,” he shouted. “If we don’t use them there, we won’t have a later for you to trot them out with all your
fancy talk about right timing and right equipment. Look at the mess my men are in.”
Chill looked, then shook his head with a disdainful expression on his face.
“Maybe you should reconsider,” Bagnall told him.
The German general fixed him with a baleful stare. “I knew this piece of dumbheadedness was doomed to fail the moment it was suggested,” he said. “It is nothing more than a smokescreen to get good German troops thrown into the fire to save the Anglo-Russian alliance.”
“Oh, balls,” Bagnall said in English. Chill understood him; his face got even chillier. Aleksandr German didn’t, but he got the tone. The RAF man went on, in German again, “Not half an hour ago, I sent a Russian off confirming your—or some German’s, anyhow—order to fall back. I’m trying to do the best job I can, given my look at the map.”
“Perhaps you left your spectacles behind when you left London,” Chill suggested acidly.
“Maybe I did, but I don’t think so.” Bagnall turned to Aleksandr German. “Brigadier, I know there aren’t many tanks on your section of the front; if the Lizards had a lot of tanks, they’d be here by now, and we’d all be dead, not bickering. But are they using those troop carriers with the turret-mounted guns?”
“Yes, we have seen a good many of them,” the partisan leader answered at once.
“There!” Bagnall said to Kurt Chill. “Are those troop carriers a good enough target for your antitank lads? You’d have to be lucky to take out a Lizard tank with an 88, but you can do all sorts of lovely things to a troop carrier with one.”
“This is so.” Chill rounded on Aleksandr German. “Why did you not say light armor was part of the threat you were facing? Had I known, I would have released units from the battalion at once.”
“Who can tell what will make up a fascist’s mind?” Aleksandr German answered. “If you’re going to send men, you’d better go and do it.” They left the map room together, arguing now about how many men and guns and where they needed to go rather than whether to send any at all.
Bagnall indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt “Whew!” Jerome Jones walked over and patted him on the back.
“Nicely done,” Ken Embry said. “We are earning our keep here after all, seems to me.” He got himself a glass of hot, brownish muck from the samovar, then let one eyelid droop in an unmistakable wink. “D’you suppose Comrade Brigadier German has really seen a whole fleet of armored troop carriers, or even so many as one?”
Jones gaped; his head swung from Embry to Bagnall and back again. Bagnall said, “I haven’t the foggiest notion, truth to tell. But he picked up his cue in a hurry, didn’t he? If armor rumbles into the neighborhood, even a literal-minded Jerry can hardly quarrel with rolling out the antitank guns, now can he?”
“Doesn’t look as though he can, at any rate,” Embry said. “I would have to say that hand goes to the heroic partisan.” He raised his glass in salute.
“Comrade German is one very sharp chap,” Bagnall said. “How good he is as a soldier or a leader of men I’m still not certain, but he misses very little.”
“You threw out that line sure it was a lie and expecting him to snap at it anyhow,” Jones said, almost in accusation.
“Haven’t you ever done the like, with a barmaid for instance?” Bagnall asked, and was amused to watch the radarman turn red. “My notion was that if he said no, we’d be no worse off than we were already: Chill was going to balk, and we have nothing save whatever he uses as a sense of honor to get him to keep the promise he made to accept our decision. Giving him a reason he could swallow for doing what we wanted looked to be a good idea.”
“And next time, with luck, he’ll be likelier to go along,” Embry said. “Unless, of course, his men get wiped out and the position overrun, which is a risk in this business.”
“If that happens, it will announce itself,” Bagnall said, “most likely by artillery shells starting to land on Pskov.” He pointed to the map. “We can’t lose much more ground without coming into range of their guns.”
“Nothing to do now but wait,” Jones said. “Feels like being back at Dover, waiting for the Jerries to fly over and show up on the radar screen: it’s a cricket match with the other side at bat, and you have to respond to what their batsman does.”
Hours passed. A babushka brought in bowls of borscht, thick beet soup with a dollop of sour cream floating on top. Bagnall mechanically spooned it up till the bowl was empty. He’d never fancied either beets or sour cream, but he fancied going hungry even less. Fuel, he told himself. Nasty-tasting fuel, but you need to top off your tanks.
Evening came late to Pskov these days: the town didn’t have the white nights of Leningrad to the north and east, but twilight lingered long. The western sky was still a bright salmon-pink when Tatiana came into the map room. Just the sight of her roused all the Englishmen, who were fighting yawns: even in the shapeless blouse and baggy trousers of a Red Army soldier, she seemed much too decorative to have a rifle with a telescopic sight slung over her back.
Jerome Jones greeted her in Russian. She nodded to him, but astonished Bagnall by walking up to him and kissing him to a point just short of asphyxiation. Her clothes might have concealed her shape, but she felt all woman in his arms.
“My God!” he exclaimed in delighted amazement. “What’s that in aid of?”
“I’ll ask,” Jones said, much less enthusiastically. He started speaking Russian again; Tatiana replied volubly. He translated. “She says she’s thanking you for getting the Nazi mother-molester—her words—to move his guns forward. They hit a munitions store when they shelled the rear area, and took out several troop carriers at the front lines.”
“They really were there,” Embry broke in.
Tatiana went on right through him. After a moment, Jones followed her: “She says she had a good day sniping, too, thanks to the confusion the guns sowed among them, and she thanks you for that, too.”
“Looks as though we’ve held, at least for the time being,” Embry said.
Bagnall nodded, but he kept glancing over at Tatiana. She was watching him, too, as if through that rifle sight. Her gaze was smoky as the fires Pskov used for heating and cooking. It warmed Bagnall and chilled him at the same time. He could tell she wanted to sleep with him, but the only reason he could see for it was that he’d helped her do a better job of killing.
The old saw about the female of the species being more deadly than the male floated through his mind. He’d heard it a dozen times over the years, but never expected to run across its exemplification. He didn’t meet Tatiana’s gaze again. No matter how pretty she was, as far as he was concerned, Jerome Jones was welcome to her.
Crack! Sam Yeager took an automatic step back. Then he realized the line drive was hit in front of him. He dashed in, dove. The ball stuck in his glove. His right hand closed over it to make sure it didn’t pop out. He rolled over on the grass, held up his glove to show he had the ball.
The fellow who’d smacked the drive flipped away his bat in disgust. Yeager’s teammates and, from behind the backstop, Barbara yelled and clapped. “Nice catch, Sam!” “Great play!” “You’re a regular Hoover out there.”
He threw the ball back to the PFC who was playing short, wondering what all the fuss was about. If you couldn’t make that play, you weren’t a ballplayer, not by the standards he set for himself. Of course, by those standards he was probably the only ballplayer at the Sunday afternoon pickup game. He might not have ever come close to the big leagues, but even a Class B outfielder looked like Joe DiMaggio here.
After an error on a routine ground ball, a strikeout ended the inning. Yeager tossed his glove to the ground outside the foul line and trotted in to the chicken-wire cage that served for a dugout. He was due to lead off the bottom of the sixth.
He’d walked his first time up and swung at a bad ball the second, hitting a little bleeder that had been an easy out. The pitcher for the other side had a pretty strong arm, but he also though
t he was Bob Feller—or maybe getting Yeager the last time had made him cocky. After wasting a curve down and away, he tried to bust Sam in on the fists with a fastball.
It wasn’t fast enough or far enough in. Sam’s eyes lit up as soon as he pulled the trigger. Thwack! When you hit the ball dead square, your hands hardly know it’s met the bat—but the rest of you does, and so does everybody else. The pitcher wheeled through one of those ungainly pirouettes pitchers turn to follow the flight of a long ball.
The ball would have been out of Fan’s Field or any other park in the Three-I League, but the field they were playing on didn’t have fences. The left fielder and center fielder both chased after the drive. Sam ran like hell. He scored standing up. His teammates pounded him on the back and slapped him on the butt.
Behind the backstop, Barbara bounced up and down. Beside her, Ullhass and Ristin hissed excitedly. They weren’t about to try going anywhere, not with so many soldiers around.
Yeager sat down on the park bench in the dugout. “Whew!” he said, panting. “I’m getting too old to work that hard.” Somebody found a threadbare towel and fanned him with it, as if he were between rounds in a fight with Joe Louis. “I’m not dead yet,” he exclaimed, and made a grab for it.
He got another hit his next time up, a line single to center, stole second, and went to third when the catcher’s throw flew over the shortstop’s head. The next batter picked him up with a ground single between the drawn-in shortstop and third baseman; that was the last run in a 7-3 win.
“You beat them almost singlehanded,” Barbara said when he came around the wire fence to join her and the Lizard POWs.
“I like to play,” he answered. Lowering his voice, he added, “And this isn’t near as tough a game as I’m used to.”
“You certainly made it look easy,” she said.
“Make the plays and it does look easy, like anything else,” he said. “Mess them up and you make people think nobody could ever play it right. God knows I’ve done that often enough, too—otherwise I wouldn’t have been in the bush leagues all those years.”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 133