Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Never mind.” In a way, Jager was relieved-if Himmler and Hitler had signed off on this, at least Skorzeny wasn’t running wild… or no wilder than usual, at any rate. Still-“Strikes me as a waste of a bomb. There’s nothing threatening coming out of Lodz. Look what happened the last time the Lizards even tried sending something up our way through the town: it got here late and chewed up, thanks to what happened down there.”

  “Oh, yes, the Jews did us a hell of a favor.” Skorzeny rolled his eyes. “When they hit the Lizards, the bastards all wore German uniforms, so they didn’t get blamed for it-we did. I did in particular, as a matter of fact. The Lizards bribed a couple of Poles with scope-sighted rifles to come up here and go Skorzeny-hunting to see if they could pay me back.”

  “You’re still here,” Jager noted.

  “You noticed that, did you?” Skorzeny made as if to kiss him on the cheek. “You’re such a clever boy. And both the Poles are dead, too. It took a while-we know to the zloty how big their payoff was.” His smile showed teeth; maybe he was remembering how the Poles perished. But then he looked grim. “Lieutenant-Colonel Brockelmann is dead, too. Unlucky son of a whore happened to be about my size. One of the Poles blew off the top of his head from behind at about a thousand meters. Damn fine shooting, I must say. I complimented the fellow on it as I handed him his trigger finger.”

  “I’m sure he appreciated that,” Jager said dryly. Associating with Skorzeny had rubbed his nose in all the uglier parts of warfare, the parts he hadn’t had to think about as a panzer commander. Mass murder, torture… he hadn’t signed up for those. But they were part of the package whether he’d signed up for them or not. Was destroying a city where the people were doing theReich more good than harm? Was their being Jews reason enough? Was their having piqued Skorzeny for not letting him destroy them on his first try reason enough? He’d have to think about that-and he couldn’t waste too much time doing it, either. Meanwhile, he asked, “So what am I supposed to do about all this? What’s the favor you have in mind? I’ve never been into Lodz, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, I know that.” Skorzeny stretched like a tiger deciding he was too full to go hunting right now. “If you had been in Lodz, you’d be talking with theSicherheitsdienst or theGestapo now, not me.”

  “I’ve talked with them before.” Jager shrugged, trying not to show the stab of alarm he felt.

  “I know that, too,” Skorzeny answered. “But they would be asking more-pointed questions this time, and using more pointed tools. Never mind all that. I don’t want you to go into Lodz.” The tiger became more alert. “I’m not sure I’d trust you to go into Lodz. I want you to lay on a diversionary attack, make the Lizards look someplace else, while I trundle on down the road with my band of elves and make like St. Nicholas.”

  “Can’t do it tomorrow. If that’s what you have in mind,” Jager answered promptly-and truthfully. “Every time we fight, it hurts us worse than the Lizards, a lot worse. You know that. We’re sort of putting things back together here right now, bringing up new panzers, new men, getting somewhere close-well, closer-to establishment strength. Give me a week or ten days.”

  He expected Skorzeny to blow up, to demand action yesterday if not sooner. But the SS man surprised him-Skorzeny spent a lot of time surprising him-by nodding. “That’s fine. I still have some arrangements of my own to work out. Even for elves, hauling in a bloody big crate takes a bit of planning. I’ll let you know when I need you.” He thumped Jager on the back. “Now you can go back to thinking about your Russian with her clothes off.” He walked away, laughing till he wheezed.

  “What the devil was all that in aid of, sir?” Gunther Grillparzer asked.

  “The devil indeed.” Jager glanced toward the panzer gunner, whose eyes followed Skorzeny as if he were some cinema hero. “He’s found some new reasons for getting a bunch of us killed, Gunther.”

  “Wunderbar!”Grillparzer said with altogether unfeigned enthusiasm, leaving Jager to contemplate the vagaries of youth. He came up with a twisted version of the Book of Ecclesiastes: vagary of vagaries, all is vagary. It seemed as good a description of real life as the more accurate reading.

  “Ah, good to see you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Iosef Stalin said as Molotov entered his Kremlin office.

  “And you, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov answered. Stalin had a purr in his voice that Molotov hadn’t heard in a long time: not since just after the previous Soviet atomic bomb, as best he could remember. The last time he’d heard it before that was when the Red Army threw the Nazis back from the gates of Moscow at the end of 1941. It meant Stalin thought things were looking up for the time being.

  “I presume you have again conveyed to the Lizards our non-negotiable demand that they cease their aggression and immediately withdraw from the territory of the peace-loving Soviet Union,” Stalin said. “Perhaps they will pay more attention to this demand after Saratov.”

  “Perhaps they will, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said. Neither of them mentioned Magnitogorsk, which had ceased to exist shortly after Saratov was incinerated. Measured against the blow dealt the Lizards, the loss of any one city, even an important industrial center like Magnitogorsk, was a small matter. Molotov went on, “At least they have not rejected the demand out of hand, as they did when we made it on previous occasions.”

  “If once we get them to the conference table, we shall defeat them there,” Stalin said. “Not only does the dialectic predict this, so does their behavior at all previous conferences. They are too strong for us to drive them from the world altogether, I fear, but once we get them talking, we shall free the Soviet Union and its workers and peasants of them.”

  “I am given to understand they have also received withdrawal demands from the governments of the United States and Germany,” Molotov said. “As those are also powers possessing atomic weapons, the Lizards will have to hear them as seriously as they hear us.”

  “Yes.” Stalin filled a pipe withmakhorka and puffed out a cloud of acrid smoke. “It is the end for Britain, you know. Were Churchill not a capitalist exploiter, I might have sympathy for him. The British did a very great thing, expelling the Lizards from their island, but what has it got them in the end? Nothing.”

  “They could yet produce their own atomic weapons,” Molotov said. “Underestimating them does not pay.”

  “As Hitler found, to his dismay,” Stalin agreed. For his part, Stalin had underestimated Hitler, but Molotov did not point that out. Stalin sucked meditatively on the pipe for a little while before going on, “Even if they make these bombs for themselves, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, what good does it do them? They have already saved their island without the bombs. They cannot save their empire with them, for they have no way of delivering them to Africa or India. Those will stay in the Lizards’ hands from this time forward.”

  “A cogent point,” Molotov admitted. You endangered yourself if you underestimated Stalin’s capacity. He was always brutal, he could be naive, foolish, shortsighted. But when he was right, as he often was, he was so breathtakingly right as to make up for the rest.

  He said, “If the German fascists persuade the Lizards to withdraw from territory that had been under their occupation before the aliens invaded, it will be interesting to see how many of those lands eagerly return to Nazi control.”

  “Much of the land the fascists occupied was ours,” Molotov said. “The Lizards did us a favor by clearing them from so much of it.” Nazi-held pockets persisted in the north and near the Romanian frontier, and Nazi bands one step up from guerrillas still ranged over much of what the Germans had controlled, but those were manageable problems, unlike the deadly threats the fascists had posed and the Lizards now did.

  Stalin sensed that, too, saying, “Personally, I would not be brokenhearted to see the Lizards remain in Poland. With peace, better them on our western border than the fascists: having made a treaty, they are more likely to adhere to it.”

  He had underestimated Hitl
er once; he would not do it twice. Molotov nodded vigorously. Here he agreed with his superior. “With the Nazis’ rockets, with their gas that paralyzes breathing, with their explosive-metal bombs, and with their fascist ideology, they would make most unpleasant neighbors.”

  “Yes.” Stalin puffed out more smoke. His eyes narrowed. He looked through Molotov rather than at him. It was not quite the hooded look he gave when mentally discarding a favorite, consigning him to thegulag or worse. He was just thinking hard. After a while, he said, “Let us be flexible, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. Let us, instead of demanding withdrawal before negotiations, propose a cease-fire in place while negotiations go on. Perhaps this will work, perhaps it will not. If we are no longer subject to raids and bombings, our industry and collective farms will have the chance to begin recovery.”

  “Shall we offer this proposal alone, or shall we try to continue to maintain a human popular front against the alien imperialists?” Molotov asked.

  “You may consult with the Americans and Germans before transmitting the proposal to the Lizards,” Stalin said with the air of a man granting a great boon. “You may, for that matter, consult with the British, the Japanese, and the Chinese-the small powers,” he added, dismissing them with a wave of his hand. “If they are willing to make the Lizards the same offer at the same time, well and good: we shall go forward together. If they are unwilling… we shall go forward anyway.”

  “As you say, Comrade General Secretary.” Molotov was not sure this was the wisest course, but imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he got the despatch announcing the new Soviet policy-and, better yet, imagining von Ribbentrop’s face when he had to bring Hitler the news-came close to making it all worthwhile. “I shall begin drafting the telegram at once.”

  Heinrich Jager was getting to be a pretty fair horseman. The accomplishment filled him with less delight than it might have under other circumstances. When you had to climb on a horse to go back and visit corps headquarters, that mostly proved you didn’t have enough petrol to keep your utility vehicles operational. Since theWehrmacht barely had enough petrol to keep its panzers operational, the choice lay between visiting corps headquarters on a bay mare or on shank’s mare. Riding beat the devil out of walking.

  The road through the forest forked. Jager urged the mare south, down the right-hand fork. That was not the direct route back to his regiment. One of the good things-one of the few good things-about riding a horse as opposed to aVolkswagen was that you did it by yourself, without a driver. Jager didn’t want anyone to know he was turning down the right-hand fork. If anyone found out, in fact, he would soon be having intimate discussion with the SS, the SD, theGestapo, theAbwehr, and any other security or Intelligence service that could get its hands (to say nothing of assorted blunt, sharp, heated, and electrically conductive instruments) on him.

  “Why am I doing this?” he said in the middle of forest stillness broken only by the distant rumble of artillery. The mare answered with a snort.

  He felt like snorting himself. He did know the answer: partly the debt he felt to Anielewicz personally, partly that Anielewicz and his Jewish fighters had kept their side of the bargain they’d made with him and didn’t deserve incineration, partly the way his stomach knotted whenever he thought about what the forces of theReich had done to the Jews of eastern Europe before the Lizards came-and were still doing to the Jews remaining in the territory they controlled. (He remembered all too vividly the Jewish and homosexual prisoners who worked on the atomic pile underSchloss Hohentubingen till they died, which seldom took long.).

  Was all that reason enough to violate his military oath? The head of the SS and theFuhrer himself had authorized Skorzeny to visit atomic fire upon Lodz. Who was Colonel Heinrich Jager to say they were wrong?

  “A man,” he said, answering the question no one had asked aloud. “If I can’t live with myself, what good is anything else?”

  He sometimes wished he could turn off his mind, could numb himself to everything that happened in war. He knew a good many officers who were aware of the horrors theReich had committed in the east but who refused to think about them, who sometimes even refused to admit they were aware of them. Then there was Skorzeny, who knew but didn’t give a damn. Neither path suited Jager. He was neither an ostrich, to stick his head in the sand, nor a Pharisee, to pass by on the other side of the road.

  And so here he was riding down this side of this road, a submachine gun on his knee, alert for Lizard patrols, German patrols, Polish brigands, Jewish brigands… anyone at all. The fewer people he saw, the better he liked it.

  His nerves jumped again when he came out of the forest into open farm country. Now he was visible for kilometers, not just a few meters. Of course, a lot of men got around on horseback these days, and a lot of them were in uniform and carried weapons. Not all of those were soldiers, by any means. The times had turned Poland as rough as the cinema made the America Wild West out to be. Rougher-the cowboys didn’t have machine guns or panzers.

  His eyes swiveled back and forth. He still didn’t see anybody. He rode on. The farm wasn’t far. He could leave his message, boot the mare up into a trot, and be back with his regiment at the front only an hour or so later than he should have been. Given how erratic any sort of travel was these days, no one would think twice over that.

  “Here we go,” he said softly, recognizing the well-kept little grove of apple trees ahead. Karol would pass the word to Tadeusz, Tadeusz could get it to Anielewicz, and that would be that.

  Everything was quiet ahead. Too quiet? The hair prickled up on the back of Jager’s neck. No chickens ran in the yard, no sheep bleated, no pigs grunted. For that matter, no one was in the fields, no toddlers played by the house. Like a lot of Poles, Karol was raising a great brood of children. You could always spot them-or hear them, anyhow. Not now, though.

  His horse snorted and sidestepped, white showing around her eyes. “Steady,” Jager said, and steady she was. But something had spooked her. She was walking forward, yes, but her nostrils still flared with every breath she took.

  Jager sniffed, too. At first he noted nothing out of the ordinary. Then he too smelled what was bothering the mare. It wasn’t much, just a faint whiff of corruption, as if aHausfrau hadn’t got round to cooking a joint of beef until it had stayed in the icebox too long.

  He knew he should have wheeled the horse around and ridden out of there at that first whiff of danger. But the whiff argued that the danger wasn’t there now. It had come and gone, probably a couple of days before. Jager rode the ever more restive mare up to the farmhouse and tied her to one of the posts holding up the front porch. As he dismounted, he flipped the change lever on his Schmeisser to full automatic.

  Flies buzzed in and out through the front door, which was slightly ajar. Jager kicked it open. The sudden noise made the mare quiver and try to run. Jager bounded into the house.

  The first two bodies lay in the kitchen. One of Karol’s daughters, maybe seven years old, had been shot execution-style in the back of the neck. His wife lay there, too, naked, on her back. She had a bullet hole between the eyes. Whoever had been here had probably raped her a few times, or more than a few, before they’d killed her.

  Biting his lip, Jager walked into the parlor. Several more children sprawled in death there. The visitors had served one of them, a little blond of about twelve whom Jager remembered as always smiling, the same way they had Karol’s wife. The black bread he’d had for breakfast wanted to come back up. He clamped his jaw and wouldn’t let it.

  The door to Karol’s bedroom gaped wide, like his wife’s legs, like his daughter’s. Jager walked in. There on the bed lay Karol. He had not been slain neatly, professionally, dispassionately. His killers had taken time and pains on their work. Karol had taken pain, too, some enormous amount of it, before he was finally allowed to die.

  Jager turned away, partly sickened, partly afraid. Now he knew who had visited this farmhouse before him. They’d signed their masterpi
ece, so to speak: on Karol’s belly, they’d burned in the SS runes with a redhot poker or something similar. The next interesting question was, how much had they asked him before they finally cut out his tongue? He didn’t know Jager’s name-the panzer colonel called himself Joachim around here-but if he’d described Jager, figuring out who he was wouldn’t take the SS long.

  Whistling tunelessly, Jager went outside, unhitched the mare, and rode away. Where to ride troubled him. Should he flee for his life? If he could get to Lodz, Anielewicz and the Jews would protect him. That was loaded with irony thick enough to slice, but it was also probably true.

  In the end, though, instead of riding south, he went north, back toward his regiment. Karol and his family had been dead for days now. If the SS did know about him, they would have dropped on him by now. And, never mind the Jews, he still had the war against the Lizards to fight.

  When he did get back to the regimental encampment, Gunther Grillparzer looked up from a game of skat and said, “You look a little green around the gills, sir. Everything all right?”

  “I must have drunk some bad water or something,” Jager answered. “I’ve been jumping down off this miserable creature”-he patted the horse’s neck-“and squatting behind a bush about every five minutes, all the way back from corps headquarters.” That accounted not only for his pallor but also for getting back here later than he should have.

  “The galloping shits are no fun at all, sir,” the panzer gunner said sympathetically. Then he guffawed and pointed to Jager’s mare. “The galloping shits! Get it, sir? I made a joke without even noticing.”

  “Life is like that sometimes,” Jager said. Grillparzer scratched his head. Jager just led away the horse. He’d ridden it a long way; it needed seeing to. Grillparzer shrugged and went back to his card game.