Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  “Before we examine ways and means, we still need to consider whether we should take this course.” Molotov’s impassive voice concealed the desperation that grew inside him Stalin pretended he had not spoken and answered Koniev instead: “Comrade, the bomb is too bulky to fit into any of our bombers, and, as you say, the Lizards shoot them down too readily to make them a good way to deliver it anyhow. But planes are for taking bombs to an enemy who is far away if the enemy is instead coming to you—” He let the sentence hang.

  Molotov scratched his head, not sure where Stalin was going with that. It must have made sense to Zhukov and Koniev though they both chuckled. Zhukov finished the phrase for Stalin:“—you put the bomb where he will be and wait.”

  “Just so,” Stalin said happily. In fact, we shall encourage him to concentrate in the sector where we shall place the bomb to make sure we do him as much damage as we can. Now it made sense to Molotov too, but it didn’t t make him any happier.

  Koniev said “Two risks here. The first is that the weapon will be discovered; past maskirovka, I don’t see what we can do about that. The second is that a weapon left behind won’t go off when we want it to. How do we make sure that does not happen?”

  “We have multiple devices to set it off,” Stalin answered. “One is by radio signal, one is with a battery, and one is with a clockwork manufactured by German prisoners in our employ.” He spoke utterly without irony; Molotov had no doubt those prisoners were no longer among the living. “They did not know to what device the clockwork would be affixed, of course. But it has been tested repeatedly; it is most reliable.”

  “Just as well, considering the use to which it will be put.” But Koniev nodded. “You are right, Comrade General Secretary: however vile the fascists may be, they make excellent mechanical devices. This clockwork or one of the other means you noted should definitely be able to set off the bomb at a time of our choosing.”

  “So the engineers and scientists have assured me,” Stalin said with a slight purr in his voice that told what would happen if the engineers and scientists were wrong. Molotov would not have wanted to be in the shoes of the men who labored on that kolkhoz outside of Moscow.

  He pushed forward between Zhukov and Koniev. Both officers looked at him in surprise; he was usually a good deal less assertive at military conferences, which he attended mostly so he would know how developments on the battlefield affected the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. He studied the map. Red units represented Soviet forces, green the Lizards, and occasional pockets of blue German troops that still fought on in the land they had invaded almost two years before.

  Even to his unsoldierly eye, the situation looked grim. The makeshift line patched together between Sukhinichi and Kaluga wasn’t going to hold. He could see that already; not enough Red Army forces were in place to hold back the advancing Lizard armor. And once the line was pierced, it was fall back or get cut off from your comrades and surrounded. Nazi panzers had done that to Soviet troops again and again in the desperate summer and fall of 1941.

  Nonetheless, he stabbed a hesitant finger out toward Kaluga. “Cannot we stop them here?” he asked. “Any effort, it seems to me, would be better than using the explosive metal bomb and facing whatever retaliation the Lizards may choose to inflict.”

  “Even Kaluga is too close to Moscow, far too close,” Stalin said. “From airstrips behind the city, they can smash us to pieces.” But he glanced at Zhukov before he went on, “If they don’t come past Kaluga, we shall not deploy the bomb.”

  “That is an excellent decision, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said fulsomely. Zhukov and Koniev both nodded. Molotov felt sweat under the armpits of his white cotton shirt. He wondered if the Tsar’s courtiers had had to tread so carefully in guiding their sovereign toward a sensible course. He doubted it—not since the days of Peter the Great, anyhow, or maybe Ivan the Terrible.

  When Stalin spoke again, his voice held some of the steel that had given Iosef Dzhugashvili his revolutionary sobriquet: “If the Lizards advance past Kaluga, however, the bomb will be used against them.”

  Molotov looked to Koniev and Zhukov for support. He found none. The marshal and the general were both nodding, perhaps without enthusiasm but. without hesitation, either. Molotov made his own head go up and down. Useless to argue with Stalin, he told himself Useless to antagonize him. He kept on nodding, though in his heart winter’s chill had returned to oust the bright spring day.

  Heinrich Jäger glanced up at the, sun before he raised the binoculars to his eyes. In the afternoon, the Lizards down in Split might have been able to spot reflections from the lenses. The hill-fortress of Klis in which he sheltered sat only a few kilometers inland from the city on the Adriatic coast.

  The Zeiss optics brought Split leaping almost within arm’s length. Sixteen hundred years after it was built, Diocletian’s palace still dominated Jäger’s view of the city. Fortress is a better word he thought. Actually, it was in essence a Roman legionary camp transformed into stone: a rough rectangle with sides of 150 to 200 meters, each one pierced by a single, central gate. Three of the four towers at the corners of the rectangle were still standing.

  Jäger lowered the binoculars. “Not a place I’d care to try attacking, even nowadays, without heavy artillery on my side,” he said.

  Beside him, Otto Skorzeny grunted. “I can see why you, went into armor, Jäger: you have no head for the subtleties.”

  “What’s that Hungarian curse?—a horse’s cock up your arse?” Jäger said. Both men laughed. Jäger peered through the binoculars again. Even they couldn’t make the Lizard sentries on the walls of the palace and in positions around it seem much more than little moving antlike specks. They were well sited, no doubt about that; in set-piece situations, the Lizards were quite competent.

  Skorzeny chuckled again. “I wonder if our scaly friends down there know that we have better plans of their strongpoint than they do.”

  “They wouldn’t have picked it if they did,” Jäger answered. The plans hadn’t come out of the archives of the German General Staff, but from the Zeitschrift für sudosteuropäischen Archãologie. Skorzeny found that vastly amusing, and called Jäger “Herr Doktor Professor” every chance he got. But even Skorzeny had to admit that the quality of the plans couldn’t have been better had military engineers drafted them.

  “I think you’re right,” the SS man said. “To them it’s just the strongest building in town, so naturally it’s where they moved in.”

  “Yes.” Jäger wondered if the Lizards had a concept of archaeology. Word filtering out of intelligence said they were conservative by nature (which he’d already discovered from fighting against them) and that they’d had their own culture as a going concern since the days when people were barbarians if not downright (and barely upright) savages. That made Jäger think they wouldn’t reckon any building a mere millennium and a half old worth studying as a monument of antiquity.

  “So, what are you, going to do about getting those cursed creatures out of there?” Marko Petrovic asked in fluent if accented German. The Croatian captain’s khaki uniform contrasted with the field gray the Germans wore. Even though Petrovic wore a uniform, being around him made Jäger nervous—he seemed more bandit chief than officer. His thick black beard only added to the effect. It did not, however, completely conceal facial scars that made the one seaming Skorzeny’s cheek a mere scratch by comparison.

  Skorzeny turned to the Croat and said, “Patience, my friend. We want to do the job properly, not just quickly.”

  Petrovic scowled. His beard and scars made that scowl fearsome, but the look in his eye chilled Jäger more. To Petrovic, it wasn’t just a military problem; he took it personally. That would make him a bold fighter, but a heedless one: Jäger performed the evaluation as automatically as he breathed.

  “What’s the complication?” the Croat demanded. “We’re in easy shelling range of the place now. We move in some artillery, open up, and—”

 
The idea of shelling a building that had stood since the start of the fourth century sickened Jäger, but that wasn’t why he shook his head. “Artillery wouldn’t root them all out, Captain, and it would give them an excuse to expand their perimeter to take in these hills. They’re staying in town; I’d just as soon keep them down there as long as they’re willing to sit quietly.”

  “You would not be bleating ‘patience’ if Split were a town in the Reich,” Petrovic said.

  He had a point; Hitler waxed apoplectic over German territory lost. Jäger was not about to admit that, though. He said, “We have a chance to drive them out, not just annoy them. I aim to make certain we don’t waste it.”

  Petrovic glowered—like a lot of the, locals, he had a face that was made for glowering:, long and bony, with heavy eyebrows and deep set eyes—but subsided. Skorzeny swatted him on the back and said, “Don’t you worry. We’ll fix those miserable creatures for you.” He, sounded breezy and altogether confident.

  If he convinced Petrovic, the Croat captain did a good job of hiding it. He said, “You Germans think you can do everything. You’d better be right this time, or—” He didn’t say or what, but walked off shaking his head.

  Jäger was glad he’d gone. “Some of these Croats are scary bastards,” he said in a low voice. Skorzeny nodded, and anyone who worried him enough for him to admit it was a very rugged customer indeed. Jäger went on, “We’d better get the Lizards out of there, because if we don’t, Ante Pavelic and the Ustashi will be just as happy in bed with them as with us, as long as the Lizards let them go on killing Serbs and Jews and Bosnians and—”

  “—all their other neighbors,” Skorzeny finished for him. He didn’t acknowledge that the Germans had done the same thing on a bigger scale all through the east. He couldn’t have been ignorant of that; he just deliberately didn’t think about it. Jäger had seen that with other German officers. He’d been the same way himself, until he saw too much for him to ignore. To him, a lot of his colleagues seemed willfully blind.

  Skorzeny pulled a flask off his belt, unstoppered it, took a healthy belt, and passed it to Jäger. It. was vodka, made from potatoes that had died happy. Jäger drank, too. “Zhiveli,” he said, one of the few words of Serbo-Croatian he’d picked up.

  Skorzeny laughed. “That probably means something like ‘here’s hoping your sheep is a virgin,’ ” he said, which made Jäger cough and choke. The SS man had another swig, then stowed the flask again. He glanced around with a skilled imitation of casual uninterest to make sure nobody but Jäger was in earshot, then murmured, “I picked up something interesting n town yesterday.”

  “Ah?” Jäger said.

  The SS colonel nodded. “you’remember when I went into Besançon, I had the devil’s own time finding any Lizards to do business with, because one of their high mucky-mucks had gone through there and cleaned out a whole raft of the chaps who’d gotten themselves hooked on ginger?”

  “I remember your saying so, yes,” Jäger answered. “It didn’t seem to stop you.” He also remembered his own amazement and then awe as the bulky Skorzeny writhed his way out of a Lizard panzer several sizes too small for him.

  “That’s my job, not getting stopped,” Skorzeny said with a mug grin that twisted the scar on his cheek. “Turns out the name of that mucky-muck was Drefsab, or something like that. Half the Lizards in Besançon thought he was wonderful for doing such a good job of clearing out the ginger lickers; the other half hated him for doing such a good job.”

  “What about it?” Jäger said, then paused. “Wait a minute, let me guess—This Dref-whoever is down there in Split now?”

  “You’re clever, you know that?” The SS man eyed him half in annoyance at having his surprise spoiled, half in admiration.

  “I wasn’t stupid to bring you along here, either. That’s it exactly, Jäger the very same Lizard.”

  “Coincidence?”

  “Anything is possible.” Skorzeny’s tone said he didn’t believe it for a minute. “But by what he did back in France, he’s got to be one of their top troubleshooters. And there aren’t any ginger lickers down there. The locals would be selling to them if there were, and the ten kilos I brought with me is gathering dust here in Klis. And if it’s not about ginger, what’s he doing down there?”

  “Dickering with the Croats?”

  Skorzeny rubbed his chin. “That makes more sense than anything I’ve come up with. The Lizards need to do some dickering, not just to get their toehold here but also because the Italians were occupying Split until they surrendered to the Lizards. Then the Croats threw ’em out. The scaly boys might be making a deal for Italy as well as for themselves. But it’s like a song that’s a little out of tune—it doesn’t seem quite right to me somehow.”

  Jäger was indignant at having his brainchild criticized.

  “Why not?”

  “What this Drefsab did in Besançon, that was police work, security work—call it whatever you like. But would you send a Gestapo man to negotiate a treaty?”

  Now Jäger looked around to make certain neither Captain Petrovic nor any of his merry men could overhear. “If I were negotiating with Ante Pavelic and his Croatian thugs, I just might.”

  Skorzeny threw back his head and bellowed laughter. A couple of riflemen in the khaki of the Independent State of Croatia glanced over to see what was so funny. Wheezing still, Skorzeny said, “Wicked man! I’ve told you before, you were wasted in panzers.”

  “You’ve told me lots of things. That doesn’t make them true,” Jäger said, which made the SS man give him a shot in the ribs with an elbow. He elbowed back, more to remind Skorzeny he couldn’t be pushed around than because he felt like fighting. Jäger gave away, centimeters, kilograms, and nasty attitude in any scrap with him; he didn’t think Skorzeny knew what quit meant, either.

  “Here dig out those plans again,” Skorzeny said. “I think I know what I want to do, but I’m not quite sure yet.” Jäger obediently dug. Skorzeny bent over the drawings, clucking like a mother hen. “I like these underground galleries. We can do things with them.”

  The halls to which he pointed lay below the southern part of Diocletian’s palace. “There used to be upper halls above them, too, with the same plan, but those are long gone,” Jäger said.

  “Then screw them.” Skorzeny didn’t care about archaeology, just military potential. “What I want to know is, what’s in these galleries?”

  “Back in Roman days, they used to be storerooms,” Jäger said. “I’m not so sure what’s in there now. We need to talk to our good and loyal Croatian allies.” He was proud of himself; that came out without a hint of irony.

  “Yes, indeed,” Skorzeny said, accepting the advice in the spirit in which it was given. “What I’m thinking is, maybe we can dig a tunnel from outside the wall into one of those galleries—”

  “Always making sure we don’t happen to tunnel into the Lizards’ barracks.”

  “That would make things more complicated.” Skorzeny chuckled. “But if we can do that, we have our good and loyal allies make a nice, loud, showy attack on the walls, draw any Lizard who happens to be underground up to the top . . . and then we bring in some of our lads through the tunnel and up, and—what was that? The horse’s cock up the arse?”

  “Yes,” Jäger said. “I like that.” Then, like a proper devil’s advocate, he started picking holes in the plan: “Moving men and weapons into the city and into the place that houses the tunnel or at least somewhere close by it isn’t going to be easy and we’ll need a lot of men. That’s a big palace down there, big enough for a church and a baptistry and a museum to fit inside, plus God knows what all else. The Lizards will have packed a lot of fighters into it.”

  “I’m not worried about the Lizards,” Skorzeny said. “If these Croats decide to hop into bed with them, though, that’ll nail our hides to the wall. We have to keep that from happening, no matter what; I don’t give a damn what we have to give Pavelic to keep him on our side.”<
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  “Free rein would probably do it, and he has that already, pretty much,” Jäger said with distaste. The Independent State of Croatia seemed to have only one plan for staying independent: hammering all its neighbors enough to make sure nobody close by got strong enough to take revenge.

  If Skorzeny felt the same revulsion Jäger did, he didn’t show it. He said, “We can promise him more chunks of the coast that the Italians are still occupying. He’ll like that—it’ll give him fresh traitors to get rid of.” He spoke without sarcasm; he might have been talking about the best way to sweeten the deal for a secondhand car.

  Jäger couldn’t be so cold-blooded. Very softly, he said, “That Schweinhund Pavelic runs a filthy regime.”

  “You bet he does, but he’s our Schweinhund, and we want make sure he stays that way,” Skorzeny answered, just as quietly. “If it does, every one of these Lizards, that Drefsab included, is ours, too.” He brought a fist down onto his knee. “That will happen.”

  Compared to yielding to the Lizards, making deals with Ante Pavelic seemed worthwhile. Compared to anything else, Jäger found it most repugnant. And yet, before the Lizards came, Pavelic had been a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of the German Reich. Jäger wondered what that said about Germany. Nothing good, he thought.

  Shanghai amazed Bobby Fiore. Much of the town was pure Chinese, and reminded him of a large-scale, rowdier version of the prison camp where he’d lived with Liu Han. So far, so good; he’d expected as much. What he hadn’t expected was the long streets packed full of European-style buildings from the 1920s. It was as if part of Paris, say, had been picked up, carried halfway round the world, and dropped down smack in the middle of China. As far as Fiore was concerned, it didn’t fit.

  The other thing that amazed him was how much damage the city had taken. You walked around, you knew they’d been in a war here. The Japs had bombed the place to hell and gone, and then burned it when they took it in 1937; he still remembered the news photo of the naked little burned Chinese boy sitting up and crying in the ruins. When he first saw it, he’d been ready to go to war with Japan right then. But he’d cooled down, and so had everybody else. Then Pearl Harbor came along and said he’d been right the first time.