Alternate Wars

by Gregory Benford

  And in case the individual was too dense to note such symbolism, less subtle clues were available: an Ustashi roadblock, where the secret police hauled drivers out of their Volkswagens and Fiats to check their papers; three or four German Luftwaffe troops, probably from the antiaircraft missile base in the hills above town, strolling along as if they owned the pavement. By the way the Croats scrambled out of their path, the locals were not inclined to argue possession of it.

  Smith watched the Luftwaffe men out of the corner of his eye till they rounded a corner and disappeared. “Doesn’t seem fair, somehow,” he murmured in Italian to Drinkwater. Out in the open like this, he could be reasonably sure no one was listening to him.

  “What’s that?” Drinkwater murmured back in the same language. Neither of them would risk the distinctive sound patterns of English, not here.

  “If this poor, bloody world held any justice at all, the last war would have knocked out either the Nazis or the bloody Reds,” Smith answered. “Dealing with one set of devils would be bad enough; dealing with both sets, the way we have the last thirty-odd years, and it’s a miracle we haven’t all gone up in flames.”

  “We still have the chance,” Drinkwater reminded him. “Remember Tokyo and Vladivostok.” A freighter from Russian-occupied Hokkaido had blown up in American-occupied Tokyo harbor in the early 1950s, and killed a couple of hundred thousand people. Three days later, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, the Russian port also suddenly ceased to be.

  “Fuuny how it was Manstein who mediated,” Smith admitted. “Of course, Stalin’s dying when he did helped a bit, too, eh?”

  “Just a bit,” Drinkwater said with a small chuckle. “Manstein would sooner have thrown bombs at the Russians himself, I expect, if he could have arranged for them not to throw any back.”

  Both Englishmen shut up as they entered the square in front of the cathedral of Our Lady. Like the Spanish fascists, the Croatians were ostentatiously pious, invoking God’s dominion over their citizens as well as that of the equally holy state. Any of the men and women heading for the Gothic cathedral ahead might have belonged to the Ustashi; it approached mathematical certainty that some of them did.

  The exterior of the church reminded Smith of a layer cake, with courses of red brick alternating with snowy marble. A frieze of angels and a statue of the Virgin surmounted the door to the upper church. As Smith climbed the ornate stairway toward that door, he took off his cap. Beside him, Drinkwater followed suit. Above the door, golden letters spelled out ZA DOM SPREMNI—Ready for the Fatherland—the slogan of fascist Croatia.

  Though Our Lady of Lourdes was of course a Catholic church, the angels on the ceiling overhead were long and thin, as if they sprang from the imagination of a Serbian Orthodox icon-painter. Smith tried to wipe that thought from his mind as he walked down the long hall toward the altar: even thinking of Serbs was dangerous here. The Croats dominated Serbia these days as ruthlessly as the Germans held Poland.

  The pews of dark, polished wood, the brilliant stained glass, and the statue of the Virgin behind the altar were familiarly Catholic, and helped Smith forget what he needed to forget and remember what he needed to remember: that he was nothing but a fisherman, thanking the Lord for his fine catch. He took out a cheap plastic rosary and began telling the beads.

  The large church was far from crowded. A few pews away from Smith and Drinkwater, a couple of Croatian soldiers in khaki prayed. An old man knelt in front of them; off to one side, a Luftwaffe lieutenant, more interested in architecture than spirituality, photographed a column’s acanthus capital. And an old woman with a broom and dustpan moved with arthritic slowness down each empty length of pew sweeping up dust and scraps of paper.

  The sweeper came up on Smith and Drinkwater. Obviously a creature of routine, she would have gone right through them had they not moved aside to let her by. “Thank you, thank you,” she wheezed, not caring whether she broke the flow of their devotions. A few minutes later, she bothered the pair of soldiers.

  Smith looked down to the floor. At first he thought the sweeper simply incompetent, to go right past a fair-sized piece of paper. Then he realized that piece hadn’t been there before the old woman went by. He worked his beads harder, slid down into a genuflection. When he went back up into the pew; the paper was in his pocket.

  He and Drinkwater prayed for another hour or so, then went back to their fishing boat. On the way Drinkwater said, “Nothing’s simple, is it?”

  “Did you expect it to be? This is Croatia, after all,” Smith answered. “The fellow who bought our eels likely hasn’t the slightest idea where the real meeting will be. It’s the God’s truth he’s better off not knowing, that’s for certain.”

  “Too right there,” Drinkwater agreed. “And besides, if we were under suspicion, the Ustashi likely would have come down on us in church. This way we run another set of risks for—”

  He broke off. Some names one did not say, not in Rijeka, not even if no one was close by to hear, not even in the middle of a sentence spoken in Italian.

  Back at the boat, the two Englishmen went on volubly—and still in Italian—about how lovely the church of Our Lady of Lourdes had been; no telling who might be listening. As they talked, Smith pulled the paper from the church out of his pocket. The message was short and to the point: Trsat Castle, the mausoleum, night after tomorrow, 2200.

  The mausoleum? Bloody melodrama, Smith thought. He passed the note to Drinkwater. His companion’s eyebrows rose as he read it. Then he nodded and ripped the paper to bits.

  Both men went out on deck. Trsat Castle, or what was left of it after long years of neglect, loomed over Rijeka from the hills outside of town. By its looks, it was likelier to shelter vampires than the Serbian agent they were supposed to meet there. It was also unpleasantly close to the Luftwaffe base whose missiles protected the local factory district.

  But the Serb had made his way across Croatia—no easy trick, that, not in a country where Show me your papers was as common a greeting as How are you today?—to contact British military intelligence. “Wouldn’t do to let the side down,” Smith said softly.

  “No, I suppose not,” Drinkwater agreed, understanding him without difficulty. Then, of themselves, his eyes went back to Trsat Castle. His face was not one to show much of what he was feeling, but he seemed less than delighted at the turn the mission had taken. A moment later, his words confirmed that: “But this once, don’t you wish we could?”

  Smith contrived to look carefree as he and Drinkwater hauled a wicker basket through the streets of Rijeka. The necks of several bottles of wine protruded from the basket. When he came up to a checkpoint, Smith took out a bottle and thrust it in a policeman’s face. “Here, you enjoy,” he said in his Italian-flavored Croatian.

  “I am working,” the policeman answered, genuine regret in his voice. The men at the previous checkpoint hadn’t let that stop them. But this fellow, like them, gave the fishermen’s papers only a cursory glance and inspected their basket not at all. That was as well, for a Sten gun lurked in the straw under the bottles of wine.

  Two more checkpoints and Smith and Drinkwater were up into the hills. The road became a dirt path. The Englishmen went off into a narrow meadow by the side of that path, took out a bottle, and passed it back and forth. Another bottle replaced it, and then a third. No distant watcher, assuming any such were about, could have noticed very little wine actually got drunk. After a while, the Englishmen lay down on the grass as if asleep.

  Maybe Peter Drinkwater really did doze. Smith never asked him afterwards. He stayed awake the whole time himself. Through his eyelashes, he watched the meadow fade from green to gray to black. Day birds stopped singing. In a tree not far away, an owl hooted quietly, as if surprised to find itself awake. Smith would not have been surprised to hear the howl of a wolf—or, considering where he was, a werewolf.

  Still moving as if asleep, Smith shifted to where he could see the glowing dial of his wristwatch: 2030, he saw.
It was full dark. He sat up, dug in the basket, took out the tin tommy gun, and clicked in a magazine. “Time to get moving,” he said, relishing the feel of English on his tongue.

  “Right you are.” Drinkwater also sat, then rose and stretched. “Well, let’s be off.” Up ahead—and the operative word was up—Trsat Castle loomed, a deeper blackness against the dark, moonless sky. It was less than two kilometers ahead, but two kilometers in rough country in the dark was nothing to sneeze at. Sweating and bruised and covered with brambles, Smith and Drinkwater got to the ruins just at the appointed hour.

  Smith looked up and up at the gray stone towers. “In England, or any civilized country, come to that, a place like this would draw tourists by the bloody busload, you know?”

  “But here it doesn’t serve the state, so they didn’t bother keeping it up,” Drinkwater said, following his thought. He ran a sleeve over his forehead. “Well, no law to say we can’t take advantage of their stupidity.”

  The way into the castle courtyard was open. Whatever gates had once let visitors in and out were gone, victims of some long-ago cannon. Inside … inside, George Smith stopped in his tracks and started laughing. Imagining the sort of mausoleum that would belong to a ruined Balkan castle, he had visualized something somber and Byzantine, with tiled domes and icons and the ghosts of monks.

  What he found was very different: a neoclassical Doric temple, with marble columns and entablature gleaming whitely in the starlight. He climbed a few low, broad steps, stood, and waited. Drinkwater came up beside him. In the judicious tones of an amateur archaeologist, he said, “I am of the opinion that this is not part of the original architectural plan.”

  “Doesn’t seem so, does it?” Smith agreed. “It—”

  In the inky shadows behind the colonnade, something stirred. Smith raised the muzzle of the Sten gun. A thin laugh came from the darkness. A voice followed: “I have had a bead on you since you came inside. But you must be my Englishmen, both because you are here at the time I set and because you chatter over the building. To the Ustashi, this would never occur.”

  Smith jumped at the scratch of a match. The brief flare of light that followed showed him a heavy-set man of about fifty, with a deeply lined face, bushy eyebrows, and a pirate’s mustache. “I am Bogdan,” the man said in Croatian, though no doubt he thought of his tongue as Serbian. He took a deep drag on his cigarette; its red glow dimly showed his features once more. “I am the man you have come to see.”

  “If you are Bogdan, you will want to buy our eels,” Drinkwater said in Italian.

  “Eels make me sick to my stomach,” Bogdan answered in the same language. He laughed that thin laugh again, the laugh of a man who found few things really funny. “Now that the passwords are out of the way, to business. I can use this tongue, or German, or Russian, or even my own. My English, I fear, is poor, for which I apologize. I have had little time for formal education.”

  That Smith believed. Like Poland, like the German Ukraine, Serbia remained a military occupation zone, with its people given hardly more consideration than cattle: perhaps less than cattle, for cattle were not hunted for the sport of it. Along with his Italian, Smith spoke fluent German and passable Russian, but he said, “This will do well enough. Tell us how it is with you, Bogdan.”

  The partisan leader drew on his cigarette again, making his face briefly reappear. Then he shifted the smoke to the side of his mouth and spat between two columns. “That is how it goes for me, Englishman. That is how it goes for all Serbia. How are we to keep up the fight for freedom if we have no weapons?”

  “You are having trouble getting supplies from the Soviets?” Drinkwater asked, his voice bland. Like most of the Balkans’ antifascists, Bogdan and his crew looked to Moscow for help before London or Washington. That he was here now—that the partisans had requested this meeting—was a measure of his distress.

  He made a noise deep in his throat. “Moscow has betrayed us again. It is their habit; it has been their habit since ’43.”

  “Stalin betrayed us then, too,” Smith answered. “If the Russians hadn’t made their separate peace with Germany that summer, the invasion of Italy wouldn’t have been driven back into the sea, and Rommel wouldn’t have had the men to crush the Anglo-American lodgment in France.” Smith shook his head—so much treachery since then, on all sides. He went on, “Tell us how it is in Serbia these days.”

  “You have what I need?” Bogdan demanded.

  “Back at the boat,” Drinkwater said. “Grenades, cordite, blasting caps…”

  Bogdan’s deep voice took on a purring note it had not held before. “Then we shall give the Germans and the Croat pigs who are their lackeys something new to think on when next they seek to play their games with us in our valleys. Let one of their columns come onto a bridge—and then let the bridge come down! I do not believe in hell, but I shall watch them burn here on earth, and make myself content with that. Have you also rockets to shoot their autogiros out of the air?”

  Smith spread his hands regretfully. “No. Now that we are in contact with you, though, we may be able to manage a shipment—”

  “It would be to your advantage if you did,” Bogdan said earnestly. “The Croats and Germans use Serbia as a live-fire training ground for their men, you know. They are better soldiers for having trained in actual combat. And that our people are slaughtered—who cares what happens to backwoods Balkan peasants, eh? Who speaks for us?”

  “The democracies speak for you,” Smith said.

  “Yes—to themselves.” Bogdan’s scorn was plain to hear. “Oh, they mention it to Berlin and Zagreb, but what are words? Wind! And all the while they go on trading with the men who seek to murder my nation. Listen, Englishmen, and I shall tell you how it is…”

  The partisan leader did not really care whether Smith and Drinkwater listened. He talked, letting out the poison that had for so long festered inside him. His picture of Serbia reminded Smith of a fox’s-eye view of a hunt. The Englishman marveled that the guerrilla movement still lived, close to two generations after the Wehrmacht rolled down on what had been Yugoslavia. Only the rugged terrain of the interior and the indomitable ferocity of the people there kept resistance aflame.

  “The Germans are better at war than the cursed Croats,” Bogdan said. “They are hard to trap, hard to trick. Even their raw troops, the ones who learn against us, have that combination of discipline and initiative which makes Germans generally so dangerous.”

  Smith nodded. Even with Manstein’s leadership, fighting the Russians to a standstill had been a colossal achievement. Skirmishes along the borders of fascist Europe—and in such hunting preserves as Serbia—had let the German army keep its edge since the big war ended.

  Bogdan went on, “When they catch us, they kill us. When we catch them we kill them. This is as it should be.” He spoke with such matter-of-factness that Smith had no doubt he meant exactly what he said. He had lived with war for so long, it seemed the normal state of affairs to him.

  Then the partisan’s voice changed. “The Germans are wolves. The Croats, their army and the stinking Ustashi, are jackals. They rape, they torture, they burn our Orthodox priests’ beards, they kill a man for having on his person anything written in the Cyrillic script, and in so doing they seek to turn us Serbs into their own foul kind.” Religion and alphabet divided Croats and Serbs, who spoke what was in essence the same language.

  “Not only that, they are cowards.” By his tone, Bogdan could have spoken no harsher condemnation. “They come into a village only if they have a regiment at their backs, and either flee or massacre if anyone resists them. We could hurt them far worse than we do, but when they are truly stung, they run and hide behind the Germans’ skirts.”

  “I gather you are coming to the point where that does not matter to you,” Smith said.

  “You gather rightly,” Bogdan said. “Sometimes a man must hit back, come what may afterward. To strike a blow at the fascists, I am willing to ally wi
th the West. I would ally with Satan, did he offer himself as my comrade.” So much for his disbelief, Smith thought.

  “Churchill once said that if Germans invaded hell, he would say a good word for the devil,” Drinkwater observed.

  “If the Germans invaded hell, Satan would need help because they are dangerous. If the Croats invaded hell, he would have trouble telling them from his demons.”

  Smith laughed dryly, then returned to business: “How shall we convey to you our various, ah, pyrotechnics?”

  “The fellow who bought your eels will pay you a visit tomorrow. He has a Fiat, and has also a permit for travel to the edge of Serbia: One of his cousins owns an establishment in Belgrade. The cousin, that swine, is not one of us, but he gives our man the excuse he needs for taking his motorcar where we need it to go.”

  “Very good. You seem to have thought of everything.” Smith turned away. “We shall await your man tomorrow.”

  “Don’t go yet, my friends.” Agile as a chamois, Bogdan clattered down the steep steps of the mausoleum. He carried a Soviet automatic rifle on his back and held a squat bottle in his hands. “I have here slivovitz. Let us drink to the death of fascists.” He yanked the cork out of the bottle with a loud pop. “Zhiveli!”

  The harsh plum brandy burned its way down Smith’s throat like jellied gasoline. Coughing, he passed the bottle to Drinkwater, who took a cautious swig and gave it back to Bogdan. The partisan leader tilted it almost to the vertical. Smith marveled at the temper of his gullet, which had to be made of something like stainless steel to withstand the potent brew.

  At last, Bogdan lowered the slivovitz bottle. “Ahh!” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “That is very fine. I—”