Without armor to support them, the Russian infantrymen who huddled in their trenches had to take whatever the Lizards dished out without much hope of hitting back. She wondered how long they would stay and fight, even with NKVD men with submachine guns back of the line to discourage them from doing anything else.
As the soldiers at the guns had, some of the infantry waved as she flew over them. She wondered if the young peasants and workers down below appreciated the irony of her sallying forth against the Lizards in an aircraft that had seemed obsolete even against the Nazis. She doubted it. All they saw was a plane with red stars on the fuselage and wings. That was enough to give them hope.
Then she was on the other side of the line, the side the Lizards controlled. The ground below her resembled nothing so much as the craters of the moon she’d once examined in a science text: the aliens were advancing through territory that had already been fought over. If that bothered them, they didn’t show it.
Pop, pop! A couple of bullets tore through the doped fabric hat covered the U-2’s wings. Ludmila grunted in dismay. The only thing that would protect her was the aircraft’s speed, and the Kukuruznik wasn’t very fast . . .
Off to one side a couple of kilometers, she glimpsed the fierce tadpole shape of a Lizard helicopter gunship. She heeled he U-2 away from it and dove even closer to the deck. The gunship could fly rings around her and blow her out of the sky, and painful experience had taught that the machine guns she carried wouldn’t do anything more than scratch its paint.
Luck stayed with her: the helicopter continued on up toward he front without spying her. And her turn brought her straight toward a convoy of lorries—some Lizard-made, others captured from the Red Army or the Nazis—also moving up with troops and supplies. She never would have spotted them if she hadn’t had to evade the gunship.
With a joyful whoop, she thumbed the firing button. The Kukuruznik jerked a little as its twin machine guns began to hammer away. Orange lines of tracers showed she was scoring hits. A German-made lorry suddenly became a ball of flame.
Ludmila whooped louder.
Lizards bailed out of vehicles and started shooting at her. She got out of there as fast as she could.
After a good strafing run like that, she could have flown back to her base and truthfully reported success. But, like most good combat pilots, she lusted for more. She buzzed on, deeper into Lizard-held territory.
Back of the line, fire came her way less often. The Lizards seemed less alert, or maybe just hadn’t counted on many human planes getting through. She wished she were flying a Pe-2 bomber with a couple of thousand kilos of high explosive rather than a wheezing trainer that had had a brace of machine guns strapped onto it. But then, the Lizards shot down Pe-2s with effortless ease.
She spied more lorries—human-made ones, stopped to fuel up. She raked them with machine-gun fire, and felt a mix of terror and crazy exhilaration when flames shot so high that she had to pull up sharply, to keep from flying straight through them.
The machine guns had performed without a jam. They usually did, so she didn’t know how much Georg Schultz’s relentless perfectionism had to do with that, but it couldn’t have hurt. She swung the U-2 back toward the north; she was low on fuel and she’d used a lot of ammunition. She was willing to bet Schultz had spent the time she was flying methodically filling belts with bullets.
Coming back, she was fired on not only by the Lizards but also by jittery Soviet troops convinced anything in the air, especially if it flew over them from the other side of the line, had to be dangerous. But the Kukuruznik, not least because it was so simple, was a rugged machine: unless you hit the engine or the pilot or were lucky enough to snap a control wire with a bullet, you wouldn’t hurt it much.
Ludmila flew over advancing Lizard tanks. They were across a small river whose line the Soviets had been holding when she’d gone out on her attack run an hour or so before. She bit her lip. It was as she’d feared: in spite of everything the Red Army could do, in spite of her own pinprick successes inside Lizard-held territory, the local position was deteriorating. Sukhinichi would fall, and after that only Kaluga stood between the Lizards and Moscow.
The U-2 bounced to a stop. A couple of groundcrew men lugged jerricans of petrol toward the airplane, squelching through mud that was still pretty thick. Behind them came Georg Schultz, ammunition belts draped across his chest so that he resembled nothing so much as a Cossack bandit. He took a chunk of black bread from a pocket of the German infantry blouse he still wore, held it out to Ludmila. “Khleb,” he said, one Russian word he’d mastered.
“Spasebo,”she answered, and took a bite. Right in back of Schultz slogged Nikifor Sholudenko. Maybe he didn’t want the German spending even a moment alone with her because they were rivals, or maybe just because he was NKVD. Either way, Ludmila was glad to see him: he was someone to whom she could report, which meant she wouldn’t have to hunt up Colonel Karpov.
Or could she? The air base looked like an anthill somebody had kicked, with people running every which way to no apparent purpose. Before she could ask any questions, Schultz spread his arms wide and exclaimed, “Bolshoye drap—big skedaddle.” That was, ironically, the same term the Russians had used to describe the flight of bureaucrats from Moscow when it looked as if the Germans would capture the capital in October 1941. Ludmila wondered if Schultz was using it with malice aforethought.
That, however, mattered relatively little. “Skedaddle?” Ludmila said in dismay. “We’re puffing out of here?”
“We are indeed,” Nikifor Sholudenko said. “Orders are to shorten, consolidate, and strengthen the defensive front.” He didn’t bother to add that that was a euphemism for retreat, just as severe fighting meant a battle we’re losing. Ludmila knew that as well as he did. So, very likely, did Georg Schultz.
Ludmila said, “May I fly another mission before we pull back? I stung them the last time; they hardly had any air defenses set up.”
“Who can defend against one of these things?” Schultz said in German, setting an affectionate hand on the U-2’s cloth-covered fuselage. “They peep in through the keyhole when you’re taking a leak.”
Sholudenko snorted at that, but to Ludmila he shook his head. “Colonel Karpov’s orders are that we leave now. They came in just after you took off; if you hadn’t been airborne, we probably would have already cleared out.”
“Where are we going?” Ludmila asked.
The NKVD man pulled out a scrap of paper, glanced down at it. “They’re setting up a new base at Collective Farm 139, bearing 43, distance fifty-two kilometers.”
Ludmila translated distance and bearing into a dot on the map. “That’s right outside Kaluga,” she said unhappily.
“Just west of it, as a matter of fact,” Sholudenko agreed. “We’re going to fight the Lizards house by house and street by street in Sukhinichi to delay them while we prepare new positions between Sukhinichi and Kaluga. Then, at need, we will fight house by house in Kaluga. I hope the need does not arise.”
He stopped there; not even an NKVD man, answerable to no one at the air base but himself and perhaps, for something particularly heinous, Colonel Karpov, wanted to say too much. But Ludmila had no trouble reading between the lines. He didn’t expect whatever makeshift line the Red Army would set up north of Sukhinichi to hold the Lizards. He didn’t expect to hold them at Kaluga, either, not by the sound of what he said. And between Kaluga and Moscow lay only plains and forest—no more cities in- which to slow down and maul the invaders.
“We’re in trouble,” Georg Schultz said in German. Ludmila wondered at his naïveté in speaking so freely: the Nazis might not have the NKVD, but they certainly did have the Gestapo. Didn’t Schultz know you weren’t supposed to open your mouth where people you couldn’t trust were listening?
Sholudenko gave him an odd look. “The Soviet Union is in trouble,” he conceded. “No more so than Germany, however, and no more so than any of the rest of the world.”
>
Before Schultz could answer, Colonel Karpov came running up the airstrip, shouting, “Get out! Get out! Lizard armor has broken through west of Sukhinichi, and they’re heading this way. We have maybe an hour to get clear—maybe not, too. Get out!”
Wearily, Ludmila climbed back into the little Kukuruznik Groundcrew men turned the plane into the wind; Georg Schultz spun the two-bladed wooden prop. The engine, reliable even if puny, caught at once. The biplane rattled down the runway and hopped into the air. Ludmila swung it northeast, toward Collective Farm 139.
Schultz, Sholudenko, and Karpov stood on the ground waving to her. She waved back, wondering if she would ever see them again. Suddenly, instead of being, the one who flew dangerous combat missions, she was the one who could escape the oncoming Lizards: If they were only an hour away, they had a good chance of overrunning the humans trying to escape from the air base.
She checked her airspeed indicator and her watch At the U-2’s piddling turn of speed, Collective Farm 139 was about half an hour away. She hoped she’d be able to spot the new base, and then hoped she wouldn’t: if the maskirovka was bad, the Lizards would notice it.
Of course, if the maskirovka was good, she’d fly around and around and probably have to set down in the wrong place because she was running out of fuel. Airspeed indicator, watch, and compass were not the most sophisticated navigational instruments around, but they were what she had.
A Lizard warplane shot by, far overhead. The howl of its jet engines put her in mind of wolves deep in the forest baying at the moon. She patted the fabric sides of her U-2. It was also an effective combat aircraft, no matter how puny and absurd alongside the jet. It had seemed puny and absurd alongside an Me-l09, too.
She was still flying along when the Lizard plane came shrieking back on the reciprocal to its former course. She wasn’t even done shifting bases, and it had already finished its mission of destruction.
Speed. The word tolled in Ludmila’s mind, a mournful bell. The Lizards had more of it at their disposal than people did: their tanks rolled faster, their planes flew faster. Because of that, they held the initiative, at least while the weather was good. Fighting them was like fighting the Germans, only worse. Nobody ever won a war by reacting to what the other fellow did.
A bullet cracked past her head, rudely slaughtering that line of thought. She shook her fist at the ground, not that it would do any good. The stupid muzhik down there was no doubt convinced that anything so clever as an airplane had to belong to the enemy. Had Stalin had the chance to continue peacefully building socialism in the Soviet Union, such ignorance might have become a thing of the past in a generation’s time. As it was . . .
A peasant working in a newly sown field of barley took off his jacket and waved it as she buzzed over him. The jacket had a red lining. Ludmila started to fly on by, then exclaimed, “Bozhemoi, I’m an idiot!” The Red Air Force wouldn’t send up a flare, literally or figuratively, to let her know exactly where the new base was. If they did, the Lizards would make sure said base didn’t last long. She could credit good navigation—or more likely good luck—for finding her target at all.
She wheeled the Kukuruznik through the sky. As she bled off speed and what little altitude she had, she spotted marks that cut across plowed furrows. They told her where planes were landing and taking off. She brought the U-2 around one more time, landed it in more or less the same place.
As if by magic, men appeared where she had been willing to swear only grain grew. They sprinted toward the biplane, bawling, “Out! Out! Out!”
Ludmila scrambled out. As her booted feet dug into the still-muddy ground, she began, “Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova reporting as—”
“Tell us all that shit later,” said one of the fellows who was hauling the U-2 away toward concealment, though of what sort Ludmila couldn’t imagine. He turned to a comrade. “Tolya, get her under cover, too.”
Tolya needed a shave and smelled as if he hadn’t seen soap and water in a long time. Ludmila didn’t hold it against him; she was probably just as rank, but didn’t notice it on herself any longer. “Come on, Comrade Pilot,” Tolya said. If he noticed she was a woman, or cared, he didn’t let on.
Some of his friends unrolled a broad stretch of matting that so cunningly mimicked the surrounding ground, she hadn’t even noticed it (she was glad she hadn’t tried taxiing across it). It covered a trench wide and deep enough to swallow an airplane. As soon as the Kukuruznik vanished into the trench, the mats went back on.
Tolya led Ludmila toward some battered buildings perhaps half a kilometer away. “We don’t have to do anything special for people,” he explained, “not with the stuff for the kolkhozniki still standing.”
“I’ve flown from bases where people lived underground, too,” Ludmila said.
“We didn’t have much digging time here,” her guide said, “and machines come first.”
Somebody unrolled another strip of matting and ducked under it carrying a lighted torch. “Is he starting a fire, down there?” Ludmila asked. Tolya nodded. “Why?” she said.
“More maskirovka,” he answered. “We found out the Lizards like to paste things that are warm. We don’t know how they spot them, but they do. If we give them some they can’t really hurt—”
“They waste munitions.” Ludmila nodded. “Ochen khorosho—very good.”
Even though they were alone in the middle of a field, Tolya looked around and lowered his voice before he spoke again: “Comrade Pilot, you’ve flown over the front south of Sukhinichi? How did it look to you?”
It was coming to pieces, Ludmila thought. But she didn’t want to say that, not to someone she didn’t know or trust: who knew what he might be under his baggy, peasant-style tunic and trousers? Yet she didn’t want to lie to him, either. Carefully, she replied, “Let me put it this way: I’m glad you don’t have much in the way of heavy, permanent installations here.”
“Huh?” Tolya’s brow furrowed. Then he grunted. “Oh. I see. We may have to move in a hurry, is that it?”
Ludmila didn’t answer; she just kept walking toward what was left of the collective farm’s buildings. Beside her, Tolya grunted again and asked no more questions; he’d understood her not-answer exactly as she meant it.
Alone on a bicycle with a pack on his back and a rifle slung over his shoulder: Jens Larssen had spent a lot of time and covered a lot of miles that way. Ever since his Plymouth gave up the ghost back in Ohio, he’d gone to Chicago and then all around Denver on two wheels rather than four.
This, though, was different. For one thing, he’d been on flat ground in the Midwest, not slogging his way up through a gap in the Continental Divide. More important, back then he’d had a goal: he’d been riding toward the Met Lab and toward Barbara. Now he was running away, and he knew it.
“Hanford,” he said under his breath. As far as he could tell, they all just wanted an excuse to get him out of their hair. “You’d think I was a goddamn albatross or something.”
All right, so he’d made it real clear he wasn’t happy about his wife shacking up with this Yeager bum. The way everybody acted, it was his fault, not hers. She’d run out on him, and she got the sympathy when he tried to put some sense into her thick head.
“It just isn’t right,” he muttered. “She bailed out, and I’m the one who’s stuck in the plane wreck.” He knew his work had suffered since the Met Lab crew got to Denver. That was another reason everybody was glad to get him out of town, on a bike if not on a rail. But how was he supposed to keep his eyes on calculations or oscilloscope readings if they were really seeing Barbara naked and laughing, her legs wrapped around that stinking corporal as he bucked above her?
He reached back over his right shoulder with his left hand to touch the hard, upthrust barrel of the Springfield. He’d thought about lying in wait for Yeager, ending those terrible visions for good. But he had enough sense left to realize he’d probably get caught and, even if he didn’t, blowing Yeager’s head off
, however delightful that might be, wouldn’t bring Barbara back to him.
“It’s a good thing I’m not stupid,” he told the asphalt of US 40 under his wheels. “I’d be in a whole heap of trouble if I were.”
He looked back over his shoulder. He was thirty miles out of Denver now, and had gained a couple of thousand feet; he could see not only the city, but the plain beyond it that sloped almost imperceptibly downward toward the Mississippi a long way away. Down in the flatlands, the Lizards held sway. If he hadn’t gone away from the city heading west, he might have left heading east.
Looked at rationally, that made as little sense as ambushing Sam Yeager, and Jens knew it. Knowing and caring were two different critters. Instead of just getting his own back from Yeager, selling out the Met Lab project gave him vengeance wholesale rather than retail, paying back all at once everybody who’d done him wrong. The idea had a horrid fascination to it, the way the’ sharp edge of a broken tooth irresistibly lures the tongue. Feel, it seems to say. This isn’t the way it should be, but feel it anyhow.
Pushing the bike along at 7,500 feet took more out of him than making it go through the flat farming country of Indiana. He stopped every so often for a blow, and just to admire the scenery ahead. Now the Rockies loomed in every direction except right behind him. In the clear, thin air, the snowcapped peaks and the deep green cloak of pine forest below them looked close enough to reach out and touch. The sky was a deep, deep blue, with a texture to it he’d never known before.
But for the sound of his own slightly winded breathing and the rustle of bushes in the breeze, everything was quiet: no buzz and wheeze of cars, no growling rumble of trucks. Jens had passed a patient convoy of horse-drawn wagons four or five miles back, and another coming into Denver just as he was leaving, but that was about it. He knew the Lizard-induced dearth of traffic meant the war effort was going to hell, but it sure worked wonders for the tourist business.
“Except there’s no tourist business any more, either,” he said. The habit of talking to himself when he was alone on his bike had come back in a hurry.
Turtledove: World War Page 123