Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “We aren’t very far above lake level,” Embry said. “We can’t be very far above sea level. I wonder how far inland the salt has soaked. That would do something to the plants, I daresay.”

  “There’s a thought,” Bagnall said. “Always nice having an explanation for things. I’ve no idea whether it’s the proper explanation, mind you, but any old port in a storm, what?”

  “Speaking of which-” Embry took out a map. “As best I can tell, we’re about ten miles from the coast.” He pointed northwest. “That great plume of smoke over there, I think, is from the great industrial metropolis of Kohtla-Jarve.” He spoke with palpable irony; had it not been for the name of the place beside it, he would have taken the dot on the map for a flyspeck.

  “Must be something going on in whatever-you-call-it,” Jerome Jones observed, “or the Lizards wouldn’t have pounded it so hard.”

  “I don’t think that’s war damage,” Ken Embry said. “The volume of smoke is too steady. We’ve seen it for the past day and a half, and it’s hardly changed. I think the Germans or the Russians or whoever controls the place have lighted off a big smudge to keep the Lizards from looking down and seeing what they’re about.”

  “Whatever it is, at the moment I don’t much care,” Bagnall said. “My question is, are we likelier to get a boat if we saunter blithely into Kohtla-Jarve or if we find some fishing village on the Baltic nearby?”

  “Would we sooner deal with soldiers or peasants?” Jones asked.

  Bagnall said, “If we try to deal with peasants and something goes wrong, we can try to back away and deal with the soldiers. If something goes wrong dealing with the soldiers, though, that’s apt to be rather final.”

  His companions considered for the next few steps. Almost in unison, they nodded. Embry said, “A point well taken, George.”

  “I feel rather Biblical, navigating by a pillar of smoke,” Jerome Jones said, “even if we’re steering clear of it rather than steering by it.”

  “Onward,” Bagnall said, adjusting his course more nearly due north, so as to strike the Baltic coast well east of Kohtla-Jarve and whatever whoever was making there. As he had been many times, Bagnall was struck by the vastness of the Soviet landscape. He supposed the Siberian steppe would seem even more huge and empty, but Estonia had enough land and to spare sitting around not doing much. It struck him as untidy. The Englishmen would walk past a farm with some recognizable fields around it, but soon the fields would peter out and it would be just-land again till the next farm.

  That they were approaching the Baltic coast didn’t make the farms come any closer together. Bagnall began to wonder if they’d find a little fishing village when they got to the sea. Hardly anyone seemed to live in this part of the world.

  One advantage of traveling at this time of year was that you could keep going as long as you had strength in you. At around the latitude of Leningrad, the sun set for only a couple of hours each night as the summer solstice approached, and never dipped far enough below the horizon for twilight to end. Even at midnight, the northern sky glowed brightly and the whole landscape was suffused with milky light. As Ken Embry said that evening, “It’s not nearly so ugly now-seems a bit like one of the less tony parts of fairyland, don’t you think?”

  Distances were hard to judge in that shadowless, almost sourceless light. A farmhouse and barn that had seemed a mile away not two minutes before were now, quite suddenly, all but on top of them. “Shall we beg shelter for the night?” Bagnall said. “I’d sooner sleep in straw than unroll my blanket on ground that’s sure to be damp.”

  They approached the farmhouse openly. They’d needed to display Aleksandr German’s safe-conduct only a couple of times; despite their worries, the peasants had on the whole been friendly enough. But they were still a quarter of a mile from the farmhouse, as best Bagnall could judge, when a man inside shouted something at them.

  Bagnall frowned. “That’s not German. Did you understand it, Jones?”

  The radarman shook his head. “It’s not Russian, either. I’d swear to that, though I don’t quite know what it is.” The shout came again, as unintelligible as before. “I wonder if it’s Estoman,” Jones said in a musing voice. “I hadn’t thought anyone spoke Estonian, the Estonians included.”

  “We’re friends!” Bagnall shouted toward the house, first in English, then in German, and last in Russian. Had he known how to say it in Estonian, he would have done that, too. He took a couple of steps forward.

  Whoever was in the farmhouse wanted no uninvited guests. A bullet cracked past above Bagnall’s head before he heard the report of the rifle whose flash he’d seen at the window. The range was by no means extreme; maybe the strange light fooled the fellow in there into misjudging it.

  Though not an infantryman, Bagnall had done enough fighting on the ground to drop to that ground when someone started shooting at him. So did Ken Embry. They both screamed, “Get down, you fool!” at Jones. He stood gaping till another bullet whined past, this one closer than the first. Then he, too, sprawled on his belly.

  That second shot hadn’t come from the farmhouse, but from the barn. Both gunmen kept banging away, too, and a third shooter opened up from another window of the house. “What the devil did we start to walk in on?” Bagnall said, scuttling toward a bush that might conceal him from the hostile locals. “The annual meeting of the Estonian We Hate Everyone Who Isn’t Us League?”

  “Shouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Embry answered from behind cover of his own. “If these are Estonians, they must have taken us for Nazis or Bolsheviks or similar lower forms of life. Do we shoot back at them?”

  “I’d sooner retreat and go around,” Bagnall said. Just then, though, two men carrying rifles ran out of the barn and toward some little trees not far away to the right. He flicked the safety off his Mauser. “I take it back. If they’re going to hunt us, they have to pay for the privilege.” He brought the German rifle with the awkward bolt up to his shoulder.

  Before he could fire, three more men sprinted from the back of the farmhouse toward an outbuilding off to the left. Ken Embry shot at one of them, but the light was as tricky for him as it was for the Estonians. All three of them safely made it to the outbuilding. They started shooting at the RAF men. A couple of bullets kicked up dirt much too close to Bagnall for his liking.

  “Bit of a sticky wicket, what?” Jerome Jones drawled. Neither the hackneyed phrase nor the university accent disguised his concern. Bagnall was worried, too.Bugger worried, he told himself-I’m bloody petrified.There were too many Estomans out there, and they too obviously meant business.

  The two men in the house and the one still in the barn kept shooting at the Englishmen, making them keep their heads down.

  Under cover of their fire and that of the fellow behind the outbuilding, the two Estonians in the trees scooted forward and farther to the right, heading for some tall brush that would give them cover.

  Bagnall snapped off a couple of shots at them as they ran, to no visible effect. “They’re going to flank us out,” he said in dismay.

  Then another rifle spoke, from behind him and to his right. One of the running men dropped his weapon and crashed to earth as if he’d been sapped. That unexpected rifle cracked again. The second runner went down, too, with a cry of pain that floated over the flat, grassy land.

  He tried to crawl to cover, but Bagnall fired twice more at him. One of the bullets must have hit, for the fellow lay quiet and motionless after that.

  One of the Estonians behind the outbuilding popped up to shoot. Before he could, the rifleman behind the RAF men squeezed off another round. The Estoman crumpled. He must have dropped his rifle, for it fell where Bagnall could see it. “We have a friend,” he said. “I wonder if he’s Russian or German.” He looked back over his shoulder, but couldn’t see anyone.

  The man in the farmhouse who’d fired first-or perhaps someone else using the same window-fired again. At what seemed the same instant, the marksman be
hind Bagnall also fired. An arm dangled limply from the window till it was dragged back inside.

  “Whoever that is back there, he’s a bloody wonder,” Embry said. The Estomans evidently thought the same thing. One of them behind the outbuilding waved a white cloth. “We have a wounded man here,” he called in oddly accented German. “Will you let us take him back to the house?”

  “Go ahead,” Bagnall said after a moment’s hesitation. “Will you let us back up and go around you? We didn’t want this fight in the first place.”

  “You may do that,” the Estonian answered. “Maybe you are not who we thought you were.”

  “Maybe you should have found out about that before you tried blowing our heads off,” Bagnall said. “Go on now, but remember, we have you in our sights-and so does our friend back there.”

  Still waving the cloth, the Estonian picked up his fallen comrade’s rifle and slung it on his back. He and his hale companion dragged the wounded man toward the farmhouse. By the limp way he hung in their arms, he was badly hurt.

  While they did that, Bagnall and his companions crawled backwards, not fully trusting the truce to which they’d agreed. But the Estonians in the house and barn evidently wanted no more of them. Bagnall realized he was withdrawing in the direction of the rifleman who’d bailed them out of that tight spot. Softly, he called,“Danke sehr,” and then, to cover all bases,“Spasebo.”

  “Nye za chto-you’re welcome,” came the answer: he’d guessed right the second time. That wasn’t what made his jaw drop foolishly, though. He’d expected whatever answer he got to be baritone, not creamy contralto.

  Jerome Jones yelped like a puppy with its tail caught in a door. “Tatiana!” he exclaimed, and went on in Russian, “What are you doing here?”

  “Never mind that now,” the sniper answered. “First we go around that house full of anti-Soviet reactionaries, since you Englishmen were foolish enough to give them quarter.”

  “How do you know they aren’t anti-fascist patriots?” Embry asked in a mixture of German and Russian.

  Tatiana Pirogova let out an annoyed snort. “They are Estonians, so they must be anti-Soviet.” She spoke as if stating a law of nature. Bagnall didn’t feel inclined to quarrel with her, not after what she’d just done for them.

  She didn’t say anything else as she led the RAF men on a long loop around the farmhouse. It went slowly; none of them dared stand while they might still be in rifle range. The house and barn, though, remained as silent as if uninhabited. Bagnall wished they had been.

  At last, cat-wary, Tatiana got to her feet. The Englishmen followed her lead, grunting with relief. “How did you come upon us at just the right moment?” Bagnall asked her, taking her rising as giving him leave to speak.

  She shrugged. “I left two days after you. You were not traveling very fast. And so-there I was. In half an hour’s time-less, maybe-I would have hailed you if the shooting had not started.”

  “What about-Georg Schultz?” Jerome Jones asked-hesitantly, as if half fearing her reply.

  She shrugged again, with magnificent indifference. “Wounded-maybe dead. I hope dead, but I am not sure. He is strong.” She spoke with grudging respect. “But he thought he could do with me as he pleased. He was wrong.” She patted the barrel of her telescopically sighted rifle to show how wrong he was.

  “What will you do now?” Bagnall asked her.

  “Get you safe to the sea,” she answered. “After that? Who knows? Go back and kill more Germans around Pskov, I suppose.”

  “Thank you for coming this far to look after us,” Bagnall said. Odd to think of Tatiana Pirogova, sniper extraordinaire (had he been inclined to doubt that, which he wasn’t, the affair at the farmhouse would have proved her talents along those lines), with a mother-hen complex, but she seemed to have one. Now he hesitated before continuing, “If we can lay hold of a boat, you’re welcome-more than welcome-to come to England with us.”

  He wondered if she’d get angry; he often wondered that when he dealt with her. Instead, she looked sad and-most unlike the Tatiana he thought he knew-confused. At last she said, “You go back to yourrodina, your motherland. So that is right for you. But this”-she stamped a booted foot down on the sickly green grass-“this is myrodina. I will stay and fight for it.”

  The Estonians she’d shot had thought this particular stretch of ground was part of their motherland, not hers. The Germans in Kohtla-Jarve undoubtedly thought of it as an extension of theirVaterland. All the same, he took her point.

  He nodded off toward the west, toward the smoke that never stopped rising from Kohtla-Jarve. “What do they make there, that they have to keep it hidden from the Lizards no matter what?” he asked.

  “They squeeze oil out of rocks in some way,” Tatiana answered. “We have been doing that for years, we and then the reactionary Estonian separatists. I suppose the fascists found the plants in working order, or they may have repaired them.”

  Bagnall nodded. That made sense. Petroleum products were doubly precious these days. Any place the Germans could get their hands on such, they would.

  “Come,” Tatiana said, dismissing the Germans as a distraction. She set off with a long, swinging stride that was a distraction in itself and gave some justification to her claim the RAF men traveled slowly.

  They reached the Baltic a couple of hours later. It looked unimpressive: gray water rolling up and back over mud. Even so, Jerome Jones, imitating Xenophon’s men, called out,“Thalassa! Thalassa!” Bagnall and Embry both smiled, recognizing the allusion. Tatiana shrugged it off. Maybe she thought it was English. To her, that tongue was as alien as Greek.

  Perhaps half a mile to the west, a little village squatted by the sea. Bagnall felt like cheering when he saw a couple of fishing boats pulled up onto the beach. Another, despite the early hour, was already out on the Baltic.

  Dogs barked as the RAF men and Tatiana came into the village. Fishermen and their wives stepped out of doors to stare at them. Their expressions ranged from blank to hostile. In German, Bagnall said, “We are three English fliers. We have been trapped in Russia for more than a year. We want to go home. Can any of you sail us to Finland? We do not have much, but we will give you what we can.”

  “Englishmen?” one of the fishermen said, with the same strange accent the Estonian fighters had had. Hostility melted. “I will take you.” A moment later, someone else demanded the privilege.

  “Didn’t expect to be quarreled over,” Embry murmured as the villagers hashed it out. The fellow who’d spoken first won the argument. He ducked back into his home, reemerging with boots and knitted wool cap, then escorted them to his boat.

  Tatiana followed. As the RAP men were about to help drag the boat into the water, she kissed each of them in turn. The villagers muttered among themselves in incomprehensible Estonian. A couple of men guffawed. That was understandable. So were the loud sniffs from a couple of women.

  “You’re certain you won’t come with us?” Bagnall said. Tatiana shook her head yet again. She turned around and tramped south without looking back. She knew what she intended to do, and had to know the likely consequences of it.

  “Come,” the fisherman said. The RAF men scrambled aboard with him. The rest of the villagers finished pushing the boat into the sea. He opened the fire door to the steam engine and started throwing in wood and peat and what looked like chunks of dried horse manure. Shaking his head, he went on, “Ought to burn coal. Can’t get coal. Burn whatever I get.”

  “We know a few verses to that song,” Bagnall said. The fisherman chuckled. The boat had probably been slow burning its proper fuel. It was slower now, and the smoke that poured from its stack even less pleasant than the smudges from Kohtla-Jarve. But the engine ran. The boat sailed. Barring the Lizards’ strafing them from the air, Finland was less than a day away.

  “Oh, Jager, dear,” Otto Skorzeny said in scratchy falsetto. Heinrich Jager looked up in surprise; he hadn’t heard Skorzeny come up. The SS man laughed
at him. “Stop mooning over that Russian popsy of yours and pay attention. I need something from you.”

  “She isn’t a popsy,” Jager said. Skorzeny laughed louder. The panzer colonel went on, “If she were a popsy, I don’t suppose I’d be mooning over her.”

  The half admission got through to Skorzeny, who nodded. “All right, something to that. But even if she’s the Madonna, stop mooning over her. You know our friends back home have sent us a present, right?”

  “Hard not to know it,” Jager agreed. “More of you damned SS men around than you can shake a stick at, every stinking one of them with a Schmeisser and a look in his eye that says he’d just as soon shoot you as give you the time of day. I’ll bet I even know what kind of present it is, too.” He didn’t say what kind of present he thought it was, not because he believed he might be wrong but from automatic concern for security.

  “I’ll bet you do,” Skorzeny said. “Why shouldn’t you? You’ve known about this stuff as long as I have, ever since those days outside Kiev.” He said no more after that, but it was plenty. They’d stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in the Ukraine.

  “What are you going to do with-it?” Jager asked cautiously.

  “Are you thick in the head?” Skorzeny demanded. “I’m going to blow the kikes in Lodz to hell and gone, is what I’m going to do, and their chums the Lizards, and all the poor damned Poles in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He laughed again. “There’s the story of Poland in a sentence,nicht wahr? The poor damned Poles, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I presume you have authorization for this?” Jager said, not presuming any such thing. If anybody could lay hands on an atomic bomb for his own purposes, Otto Skorzeny was the man.

  But not this time. Skorzeny’s big head went up and down. “You bet your arse I do: from theReichsfuhrer-SS and straight from the Fuhrer himself. Both of ’em in my attache case. You want to gape at fancy autographs?”