Cranking up the Panther was a two-man job. Wittman and Meinecke did the honors. The engine belched, farted, and came back to life. After handshakes all around, the crew climbed back into the machine and rolled on down the road.
“We’ll want to look for a good patch of woods where we can take cover for the night,” Jäger said. Such a patch might be hard to find. He checked his map. They were somewhere between Thann and Belfort, heading down to try to hold the Lizards away from the latter strategic town.
Jäger stuck his head out of the drum-shaped cupola. If he was where he thought he was—He nodded, pleased with his navigation. There ahead stood Rougement-le-Château, a Romanesque priory now in picturesque ruin. Navigating through the rugged terrain of Alsace and the Franche-Comté was a very different business from getting around on the Ukrainian steppe, where, as on the sea, you picked a compass heading and followed it. If you got lost here, heading across country wasn’t so easy. More often than not, you had to back up and retrace your path by road, which cost precious time.
The woods were still leafless, but Jäger found a spot where bare branches interlaced thickly overhead. Behind scattered clouds, the pale winter sun was low in the west. “Good enough,” he said, and ordered Wittman to pull off the road and conceal the Panther from prying eyes in the sky.
Within the next half hour, four more tanks—another Panther, two of the new Panzer IVs with relatively light protection but a long 75mm gun almost as good as the Panther’s, and a huge Tiger that mounted an 88 and armor poorly sloped but so thick and heavy that it made the panzer slower than it should have been—joined him there. The crews swapped rations, spare parts, and lies. Somebody had a deck of cards. They played skat and poker till it got too dark to see.
Jäger thought back to the splendid organization of Sixteenth Panzer when the division plunged into the Soviet Union. Back then, the thought of getting tanks into action by these dribs and drabs would have caused apoplexy in the High Command. That was before the Lizards had started plastering the German rail and road networks. Now any movement toward the front was counted a success.
He squeezed butter and meat paste from their tubes onto a chunk of black bread. As he chewed, he reflected that a lot of things had happened to him that he never would have expected before the Lizards came. He’d fought against the alien invaders side by side with a band of Russian partisans, most of them Jews.
He hadn’t had much use for Jews before then. He still didn’t have a whole lot of use for them, but now he understood why the Jews of Warsaw had risen against the town’s German occupiers to help the Lizards take it. Nothing the aliens did to them could come close to what they’d suffered at the hands of the Reich.
And yet those same Polish Jews had let him cross their territory, and hadn’t even confiscated from him all the explosive metal that had been his booty from the joint German-Soviet raid on the Lizards. True, they’d taken half to send it to the United States, but they’d let him deliver the rest to his own superiors. Even now, German scientists were working to avenge Berlin.
He took another bite. Even that wasn’t the strangest. Had anyone told him on June 22, 1941, that he would—have an affair with? fall in love with? (he still wasn’t sure about that himself)—a Soviet pilot, his most likely reaction would have been to punch the teller in the eye for calling him a fairy. On the day the war with the Soviet Union started, no one in Germany knew the Russians would use female fliers in combat.
He hoped Ludmila was all right. They’d first met in the Ukraine, where she’d plucked him and his gunner (he hoped Georg Schultz was all right, too) off a collective farm and taken them to Moscow so they could explain to the Red Army brass how they’d managed to kill a Lizard panzer. He’d written to her after that—she had some German, he a little Russian—but got no answer.
Then they’d come together at Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had pinned on him the German Cross in gold (a medal so ugly he wore only the ribbon these days) and she’d flown in Molotov for consultation with the Führer. He smiled slowly. That had been as magical a week as he’d ever known.
But what now? he wondered. Ludmila had flown back to the Soviet Union, where the NKVD would not look kindly upon her for sleeping with a Nazi … any more than the Gestapo was pleased with him for sleeping with a Red. “Screw em all,” he muttered, which drew a quizzical glance from Rolf Wittman. Jäger did not explain.
A motorcycle came put-putting slowly down the road, its headlight dimmed almost to extinction by a blackout slit cap. With the Lizards’ detectors, even that could be dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving a winding French road in pitch darkness.
The motorcycle driver spotted the panzers off under the trees. He stopped, throttled down, and called, “Anyone know where I can find Colonel Heinrich Jäger?”
“Here I am,” Jäger said, standing up. “Was ist los?”
“I have here orders for you, Colonel.” The driver pulled them out of his tunic pocket.
Jäger unfolded the paper, stooped down and held it in front of the motorcycle headlamp so he could read it. “Scheisse,” he exclaimed. “I’ve been recalled. They just put me back in frontline service, and now I’ve been recalled.”
“Yes, sir,” the driver agreed. “I am ordered to take you back with me.”
“But why?” Jäger said. “It makes no sense. Here I am an experienced fighter for Führer and Vaterland against the Lizards. But what good will I do in this Hechingen place? I’ve scarcely even heard of it.”
But he had heard of it, and fairly recently, too. Where? When? He stiffened as memory came. Hechingen was where Hitler had said he was sending the explosive metal. Without another word, Jäger walked over to his Panther, got on the radio, and turned command over to the regimental lieutenantcolonel. Then he slung his pack onto his shoulders, went back to the motorcycle, climbed on behind the driver, and headed back toward Germany.
II
Ludmila Gorbunova did not care for Moscow. She was from Kiev, and thought the Soviet capital drab and dull. Her impression of it was not improved by the endless grilling she’d had from the NKVD. She’d never imagined the mere sight of green collar tabs could reduce her to fearful incoherence, but it did.
And, she knew, things could have been worse. The chekists were treating her with kid gloves because she’d flown Comrade Molotov, second in the Soviet Union only to the Great Stalin, and a man who loathed flying, to Germany and brought him home in one piece. Besides, the rodina—the motherland—needed combat pilots. She’d stayed alive through most of a year against the Nazis and several months against the Lizards. That should have given her value above and beyond what she got for ferrying Molotov around.
Whether it did, however, remained to be seen. A lot of very able, seemingly very valuable people had disappeared over the past few years, denounced as wreckers or traitors to the Soviet Union or sometimes just vanished with no explanation at all, as if they had suddenly ceased to exist …
The door to the cramped little room (cramped, yes, but infinitely preferable to a cell in the Lefortovo prison) in which she sat came open. The NKVD man who came in wore three crimson oblongs on his collar tabs. Ludmila bounced to her feet. “Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!” she said, saluting.
He returned the salute, the first time that had happened since the NKVD started in on her. “Comrade Senior Lieutenant,” he acknowledged. “I am Boris Lidov.” She blinked in surprise; none of her questioners had bothered giving his name till now, either. Lidov looked more like a schoolmaster than an NKVD man, not that that meant anything. But he surprised her again, saying, “Would you like some tea?”
“Yes, thank you very much, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,” she answered—quickly, before he changed his mind. The German attack had deranged the Soviet distribution system, that of the Lizards all but destroyed it. These days, tea was rare and precious.
Well, she thought, the NKVD will have it if anyone does. And sure enough, Lidov stuck his head out the door and bawled a reques
t. Within moments, someone fetched him a tray with two gently steaming glasses. He took it, set it on the table in front of Ludmila. “Help yourself,” he said. “Choose whichever you wish; neither one is drugged, I assure you.”
He didn’t need to assure her; that he did so made her suspicious again. But she took a glass and drank. Her tongue found nothing in it but tea and sugar. She sipped again, savoring the taste and the warmth. “Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. It’s very good,” she said.
Lidov made an indolent gesture, as if to say she didn’t need to thank him for anything so small. Then he said idly, as if making casual conversation, “You know, I met your Major Jäger—no, you’ve said he’s Colonel Jäger now, correct?—your Colonel Jäger, I should say, after you brought him here to Moscow last summer.”
“Ah,” Ludmila said, that being the most noncommittal noise she could come up with. She decided it was not enough. “Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, as I have said before, he is not my colonel by any means.”
“I do not necessarily condemn,” Lidov said, steepling his fingers. “The ideology of the fascist state is corrupt, not the German people. And”—he coughed dryly—“the coming of the Lizards has shown that progressive economic systems, capitalist and socialist alike, must band together lest we all fall under the oppression of the ancient system wherein the relationship is slave to master, not worker to boss.”
“Yes,” Ludmila said eagerly. The last thing she wanted to do was argue about the dialectic of history with an NKVD man, especially when his interpretation seemed to her advantage.
Lidov went on, “Further, your Colonel Jäger helped perform a service for the people of the Soviet Union, as he may have mentioned to you.”
“No, I’m afraid he didn’t. I’m sorry, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, but we talked very little about the war when we saw each other in Germany. We—” Ludmila felt her face heat. She knew what Lidov had to be thinking. Unfortunately—from her point of view—he was right.
He looked down his long, straight nose at her. “You like Germans well, don’t you?” he said sniffily. “This Jäger in Berchtesgaden, and you attached his gunner”—he pulled out a scrap of paper, checked a name on it—“Georg Schultz, da, to the ground crew at your airstrip.”
“He is a better mechanic than anyone else at the airstrip. Germans understand machinery better than we do, I think. But as far as I am concerned, he is only a mechanic,” Ludmila insisted.
“He is a German. They are both Germans.” So much for Lidov’s words about the solidarity of peoples with progressive economic systems. His flat, hard tone made Ludmila think of a trip to Siberia on an unheated cattle car, or of a bullet in the back of the neck. The NKVD man went on, “It is likely that Comrade Molotov will dispense with the services of a pilot who forms such un-Soviet attachments.”
“I am sorry to hear that, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,” Ludmila said, though she knew Molotov would have been glad to dispense with the services of any pilot, given his attitude about flying. But she insisted, “I have no attachments to Georg Schultz save those of the struggle against the Lizards.”
“And to Colonel Jäger?” Lidov said with the air of a man calling checkmate. Ludmila did not answer; she knew she was checkmated. The lieutenant-colonel spoke as if pronouncing sentence: “Because of this conduct of yours, you are to be returned to your former duties without promotion. Dismissed, Comrade Senior Lieutenant.”
Ludmila had been braced for ten years in the gulag and another five of internal exile. She needed a moment to take in what she’d just heard. She jumped to her feet. “I serve the Soviet state, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!” Whether you believe me or not, she added to herself.
“Prepare yourself for immediate departure for the airport,” Lidov said, as if her mere presence polluted Moscow. An NKVD flunky must have been listening outside the door or to a concealed microphone, for in under half a minute a fellow in green collar tabs brought in a canvas bag full of her worldly goods.
Before long, a troika was taking her from the Kremlin to the airport on the edge of Moscow. The sleigh’s runners and the hooves of the three horses that drew it kicked up snow gone from white to gray thanks to city soot. Only when her beloved little U-2 biplane came into view on the runway did she realize she’d been returned to this duty, which she wanted more than any other, as if it were a punishment. She chewed on that a long time, even after she was in the air.
“I’m bloody lost,” David Goldfarb said as he pedaled his RAF bicycle through the countryside south of Leicester. The radarman came to an intersection. He looked for signs to tell him where he was—and looked in vain, because the signs taken down in 1940 to hinder a feared German invasion had never gone back up.
He was trying to get to the Research and Development Test Flying Aerodrome at Bruntingthorpe, to which he’d been ordered to report. South from the village of Peatling Magna, his directions read. The only trouble was, nobody had bothered to tell him (for all he knew, nobody was aware) two roads ran south from Peatling Magna. He’d taken the right-hand track, and was beginning to regret it.
Peatling Magna hadn’t looked magna enough to boast two roads when he rolled through it; he wondered if there could possibly be a Peatling Minima, and, if so, whether it was visible to the naked eye.
Ten minutes of steady pedaling brought him into another village. He looked around hopefully for anything resembling an aerodrome, but nothing he saw matched that description. A matronly woman in a scarf and a heavy wool coat was trudging down the street. “Begging your pardon, madam,” he called to her, “but is this Bruntingthorpe?”
The woman’s head whipped around—his London accent automatically made him out to bè a stranger. She relaxed, a little, when she saw he was in RAF dark blue and thus had an excuse for poking his good-sized nose-into a place where he didn’t belong. But even though she used the broader vowels of the East Midlands, her voice was sharp as she answered, “Bruntingthorpe? I should say not, young man. This is Peatling Parva. Bruntingthorpe lies down that road.” She pointed east.
“Thank you, madam,” Goldfarb said gravely. He bent low over his bicycle, rode away fast so she wouldn’t hear him start to snicker. Not Peatling Minima—Peatling Parva. The name fit; it had looked a pretty parva excuse for a village. Now, though, he was on the right track and—he looked at his watch—near enough on time that he could blame his tardiness on the train’s getting into Leicester late, which it had.
He hadn’t gone far toward Bruntingthorpe when he heard a screaming roar, saw an airplane streak across the sky at what seemed an impossible speed. Alarm and fury coursed through him—had he come here just in time to see the Lizards bomb and wreck the aerodrome?
Then he played in his mind the film of the aircraft he’d just seen. After the Lizards destroyed the radar station at Dover, he’d been an aircraft spotter the old-fashioned way, with binoculars and field telephone, for a while. He recognized the Lizards’ fighters and fighter-bombers. This aircraft, even if it flew on jets, didn’t match any of them. Either they’d come up with something new or the plane was English.
Hope replaced anger. Where was he more likely to find English jet aircraft than at a research and development aerodrome? He wondered why the powers that be wanted him there. He’d find out soon.
The village of Bruntingthorpe was no more prepossessing than either of the Peatlings. Not far away, though, a collection of tents, corrugated-iron Nissen huts, and macadamized runways marred the gently rolling fields that surrounded the hamlets. A soldier with a tin hat and a Sten gun demanded to see Goldfarb’s papers when he pedaled up to the barbed-wire fence and gate around the RAF facility.
He surrendered them, but could not help remarking, “Seems a fairish waste of time, if anyone wants to know. Not bloody likely I’m a Lizard in disguise, is it?”
“Never can tell, chum,” the soldier answered. “Besides, you might be a Jerry in disguise, and we’re not dead keen on that even if the match there won’t be played to a
finish.”
“Can’t say I blame you.” Goldfarb’s parents had got out of Russian-ruled Poland to escape pogroms against the Jews. By all accounts, the Nazis’ pogroms after they conquered Poland had been a hundred times worse, bad enough for the Jews there to make common cause with the Lizards against the Germans. Now, from the reports that leaked out, the Lizards were beginning to make things tough on the Jews. Goldfarb sighed. Being a Jew wasn’t easy anywhere.
The sentry opened the gate, waved him through. He rode over to the nearest Nissen hut, got off his bicycle, pushed down the kickstand, and went into the hut. Several RAF men were gathered round a large table there, studying some drawings by the light of a paraffin lamp hung overhead. “Yes?” one of them said.
Goldfarb stiffened to attention: the casual questioner, though just a couple of inches over five feet tall, wore the four narrow stripes of a group captain. Saluting, Goldfarb gave his name, specialization, and service number, then added, “Reporting as ordered sir!”
The officer returned the salute. “Good to have you with us, Goldfarb. We’ve had excellent reports of you, and we’re confident you’ll make a valuable member of the team. I am Group Captain Fred Hipple; I shall be your commanding officer. My speciality is jet propulsion. Here we have Wing Commander Peary, Flight Lieutenant Kennan, and Flight Officer Roundbush.”
The junior officers all towered over Hipple, but he dominated nonetheless. He was a dapper little fellow who held himself very erect; he had slicked-down wavy hair, a closely trimmed mustache, and heavy eyebrows. He spoke with almost professional precision: “I am told that you have been flying patrols aboard a radar-equipped Lancaster bomber in an effort to detect Lizard aircraft prior to their reaching our shores.”
“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” Goldfarb said.
“Capital. We shall make great use of your experience, I assure you. What we are engaged in here, Radarman, is developing a jet-propelled fighter aeroplane to be similarly equipped with radar, thus facilitating the acquisition and tracking of targets and, it is to be hoped, their destruction.”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 76
