A mountain stream chuckled by, close to the road. Jens ran his sleeve over his forehead again, then decided he’d earned a break. He pulled the bike over to the shoulder, let down the kickstand, and climbed off. He pulled a tin cup out of the pack tied behind the bike saddle and headed for the stream. He had to think about walking the first few steps; his legs kept wanting to go round and round.
The water, undoubtedly snowmelt, was very sweet, but so cold it gave him a savage headache for a few seconds after his first long swig. He swore as he waited for the pain to subside. A gray and blue jay scolded him from the branches of one of those pines.
“Oh, shut up,” he told it. “You’d say the same thing if it happened to you.”
He unslung the Springfield he carried on his back and looked around. He wasn’t much of a hunter, but if a deer came down for a drink, he wouldn’t say no to trying for some venison. The jay screeched again. He swung the rifle its way, then laughed at himself. He’d probably miss, and even if he didn’t, nailing a jay with a .30-caliber slug was about like smashing a roach by dropping an anvil on it. You might have a few feathers left, floating on the breeze, but that was it.
Since he was sitting by the stream, he drank another cup of water. If Bambi didn’t show up, he’d be gnawing on beef jerky for lunch. He’d traded a few rounds of rifle ammo for it just outside of a tiny town incongruously called Cambridge; the more he thought about the deal he’d made, the more he figured he’d been snookered.
The water had its usual effect. He got up and walked over to a tree—not the one in which the jay still perched. He undid his fly and, setting his teeth, took a leak against the tree trunk. It didn’t hurt as much as it had just after he came down with the clap; for a while there, he’d been wishing his joint would drop off every time he used it. But it still wasn’t what anybody in his right mind would call fun.
“Goddamn bitch,” he ground out between his teeth as he fastened himself up again. The first time he’d got laid after Barbara left, and that was the present the stinking waitress had given him. Better he should have stayed a monk.
No sign of any deer. No sign of any bears, either, but Larssen, at the moment, was not inclined to look on the bright side of things. Cursing that slut of a waitress all over again (and conveniently forgetting how much he’d enjoyed having her while she lay in his arms), he got up, went back over to the bicycle, and used his belt knife to carve off a lunch-sized slab of jerky.
Chewing on the stuff was about like gnawing well-salted shoe leather. “Good thing I’ve got a decent set of choppers,” Jens said, and the jay, as if carrying on a bad-tempered conversation with him, peevishly screeched back. “I told you once to shut up,” Larssen reminded it. It took no more notice of him than anybody else had lately.
He gulped down a mouthful of the jerky. Even after he’d been chewing on it, little sharp edges scraped his throat. His laugh wasn’t a friendly sound. “I’d like to see Mr. Sam fucking Yeager eat this stuff with his store-bought teeth,” he said. The more he thought about it, the more he figured that if Barbara could go for a guy like that, she wasn’t such a bargain after all.
But even figuring he was well rid of her didn’t make the burn of being thrown over go away. She shouldn’t have decided he was dead, not anywhere near so soon. Even if she had, even if she’d ended up in bed with that Yeager son of a bitch a time or two, she shouldn’t have married him, and she sure as hell shouldn’t have let him knock her up. That had put the kibosh on any hope she’d come to her senses, all right.
“Security,” Larssen snarled, making it into a curse word fouler than any of the others he’d been throwing around. If that stinking Colonel Hexham had just let him write to her as the Met Lab wagon train made its slow way across the northern Great Plains, everything would have been fine. But he’d literally had to go on strike in Denver to get Hexham to let him send a letter. By the time it got to her, it was too late. She was already married and already pregnant.
In peacetime, some lawyer probably would have been able to buy himself a new Packard from the fees he’d have made trying to sort out the whole mess. With the Lizards giving the whole world hell, nobody bothered with much in the way of legal niceties any more. Barbara decided she wanted to stay with Mr. Dentures, so she damn well did.
“And I’m the one who gets screwed—or rather, who doesn’t get screwed any more,” Larssen said. “Isn’t that a hell of a note?”
It was, in more ways than one. Not only did his wife up and leave him but, just because he was too burned up about it to let her go quietly, he’d been all but booted off the Met Lab team. And so, instead of the nuclear physics he loved and for which he’d spent a lifetime training, he got to play Natty Bumppo in the wilderness instead.
If he hadn’t refused to admit he was beaten, he never would have managed to make it back from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Chicago. He never would have found out where the Met Lab crew had gone, nor managed to beat them there on his own (of course, if he hadn’t been quite so efficient there, he might have had a better chance of hanging on to Barbara).
Well, he owed the Lizards a good deal, for fouling up his life beyond all recognition. So he’d go on to Hanford and see if it made a good place for building an atomic pile to blow them to hell and gone. So much seemed only fair.
“But after I do that, I’ll get even with all the people who fouled me up, too,” he said softly. “You just bet I will.” He got up from the streamside rock he’d been sitting on, walked over to the bicycle, climbed aboard, and started rolling north again.
Ludmila Gorbunova had seen more bomb craters, from closer range, than she’d ever imagined before the war began. But she’d never seen, never dreamt of, a crater like the one over which her little U-2 biplane skimmed now.
The burned area was most of a kilometer across, maybe more than a kilometer. The ground near the center had been baked into something that looked like glass, and gave back dazzling reflections of the sun. Well beyond that, trees, houses—essentially everything—had been knocked flat. It was as if God had decided to step on the land a few kilometers northeast of Kaluga.
Ludmila did not believe in God, not in the top part of her mind. She was a child of the Revolution, born in Kiev in the midst of civil war. But sometimes, in moments of stress, reactionary patterns of speech and thought emerged.
“We’ve not yet built true socialism,” she reminded herself. “Even with the German invasion, the generation born after the war might have lived to see it. Now—”
The air blowing in over the windscreen flung her words away. Having confessed her imperfection, if only to herself, she was willing to admit that stopping the Lizards’ drive on Moscow had taken something that looked very much like divine intervention.
She’d been flying back from a harassment mission against the Lizards when the bomb went off. Then she’d thought at first that the Lizards were visiting on the Soviet Union the same kind of destruction they’d meted out to Berlin and Washington. Only gradually had she realized her own country had matched the invaders at their murderous game.
The Kukuruznik—Wheatcutter—buzzed over the hulks of three Lizard tanks. Their guns slumped limply, as if they’d been made not of steel but of wax and left too close to the fire. Measuring the revenge the Soviet Union had finally taken on its tormentors filled her with fierce joy.
She fired a burst from her machine guns at the dead tanks, just to mark her own hatred. The recoil made her aircraft shudder for a moment. The U-2 had been a trainer before the war, but proved an excellent raider against the Germans and then against the Lizards. It was quiet—the Germans had dubbed it the Flying Sewing Machine—and flew at treetop height and below. Speed wasn’t everything.
“I’m still alive,” she remarked. Again, the slipstream blew her words away, but not the truth in them. The Lizards hacked higher-performance Red Air Force planes out of the sky as if they knew they were coming—no, not as if, for Intelligence was sure they did know, wi
th help from electronics of the kind that the Soviet Union was just beginning to acquire. The U-2, though, was small enough—maybe slow enough, too—to escape their notice.
Ludmila patted the fabric skin of the plane’s fuselage. She’d been in the Osoaviakhim, the Soviet pilot training organization, before the war. When she joined the Red Air Force after getting out of Kiev just before the Germans took it, she’d wanted to fly bombers or real fighters. Getting assigned to a Kukuruznik squadron had seemed a letdown: she’d flown in U-2s to learn to handle other, more deadly, aircraft
Time changed her perspective, as time has a way of doing. She patted the U-2’s fabric skin again. It kept flying, kept fighting, no matter what. “Good old mule,” she said.
As she neared Kaluga, she grew alert once more. The Lizards still held the town, though they hadn’t tried to push north from it since the bomb went off. She knew only too well that she hadn’t been invulnerable till now, just lucky—and careful. If you stopped being careful, you wouldn’t stay lucky.
Far off in the distance, she spotted a couple of Lizard trucks stopped right out in the open by a haystack. Maybe one of them had broken down, and the other paused to help. Any which way, they made a tempting target. Her thumb slid to the firing button for the U-2’s machine guns.
A moment later, she used stick and pedals to twist the little biplane away from the trucks in as tight a turn as she could manage. That haystack didn’t have quite the right shape to be sitting in a Russian field—but it was just the right shape to serve as maskirovka for one of the Lizards’ antiaircraft tanks.
She headed back toward the airstrip from which she’d taken off. If anything, dignifying the place with that description was flattery: it was just a stretch of field with underground shelters for the pilots and groundcrew, and with barley-draped camouflage nets to cover up the planes. A few hundred meters away, a false strip with dummy aircraft, tents, and occasional radio signals was much more prominent. The Lizards had bombed it several times. Soviet maskirovka really worked.
As Ludmila approached the airstrip, a fellow who looked like any other peasant took off his hat and waved at her with it in his left hand. She accepted the course correction and shifted slightly more to the north.
The Kukuruznik bounced to a stop. It was light enough to have no trouble on plowed-up dirt, and to stop very quickly once the wheels touched down. Like moles emerging from their burrows, groundcrew men dashed toward the biplane, and reached it before the prop had stopped spinning.
“Out, out, out!” they yelled, not that Ludmila wasn’t already descending from the U-2. No sooner had her boots touched ground than they manhandled the biplane toward what looked like just another piece of field. But two of them had run ahead to pull aside the camouflage netting that covered a broad trench. In went the aircraft. Back went the netting. Within two minutes of landing, not a trace of the Kukuruznik remained visible.
Ludmila ducked under the netting, too, to help ready the biplane for its next mission. She’d made herself into a good mechanic. Red Air Force pilots needed to be good mechanics, because very often the groundcrew weren’t. That wasn’t the case here; one of the fellows at the base was as good a technician and repairman as she’d ever known. Even so, she helped him as much as she could. It was, after all, her own neck.
“Zdrast’ye, Comrade Pilot,” the mechanic said in accented Russian. He was a tall, lean, ginger-bearded fellow with a grin that said he refused to take her or anything else too seriously.
“Zdrast’ye,” she answered shortly. Georg Schultz was a genius with a spanner in his hands, but he was also a dedicated Nazi, a panzer gunner who’d attached himself to the airbase staff when they were still operating out of the Ukraine. She’d helped him get his place there; she’d known him and his commander, Heinrich Jäger, before. Every so often, she wondered how wise she’d been.
“How did it go?” he asked, this time in German, of which she had a smattering: more than that now, thanks to practice with Jäger and with Schultz.
“Well enough,” she answered in the same language. She turned away from him toward the Kukuruznik so she wouldn’t have to notice the way his eyes roamed up and down her body as if she were naked rather than covered by a heavy leather flight suit. His hands had tried roaming up and down her body a couple of times, too. She’d said no as emphatically as she knew how, but nyet wasn’t a Russian word he seemed to have grasped. For that matter, he wasn’t what you’d call solid on nein, either.
Maybe her indifference was finally getting through to him, though; the next question he asked seemed strictly business: “Did you fly over the crater from the big bomb you people set off a little while ago?”
“Aber natürlich,” she answered. “It’s a good direction from which to approach: I can be sure no Lizard guns will be waiting for me from that position, and it lets me penetrate deep into their lines.”
Schultz puffed out his chest. “Me and Major Jäger—Colonel Jäger now—we were part of the raiding crew that got you Russkis the metal I expect you used to build that bomb.”
“Were you?” She wanted the words to come out cold as ice, but they didn’t, quite. One thing she reluctantly granted Schultz was his habit of telling the truth as he saw it. She found that sort of bluntness alarming in a way: how had he managed to keep it without getting raked over the coals by the Gestapo? Any Russian so outspoken would have ended up in a gulag, if he wasn’t simply executed as an enemy of the state. But Ludmila was willing to believe Schultz wasn’t lying just to impress her.
He preened some more. “Yes, we certainly were. Hadn’t been for us Germans, you Reds never would have been able to build your bomb at all.”
Ludmila felt like slapping his smug face. “I don’t suppose you Germans”—she deliberately used the Russian word, nemtsi, with its overtones of barbarism and unintelligible babbling—“would do anything like that if you didn’t get your own share of the metal, too. As you say, we built a bomb with ours. Where is the German bomb?”
Georg Schultz went a dull red. Ludmila chuckled under her breath. The Nazis thought of themselves as the lords of creation and of their Slavic neighbors as subhuman, certainly incapable of a scientific feat like the explosive-metal bomb. Reminding them that wasn’t so always gave a Russian pleasure.
“Let’s look over the aircraft,” Schultz mumbled. Ludmila didn’t argue with him—that was what they were supposed to be doing. With tools in his hands, Schultz became useful enough for her to overlook, if not to forgive, his appalling politics. His piggish approaches to her she already discounted. Plenty of Russian men were just as uncultured—Nikifor Sholudenko, for instance. The NKVD man would be debriefing her as soon as she was done inspecting the U-2.
Schultz grunted as he pried through the five-cylinder Shvetsov radial engine. Ludmila had come to know that grunt. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“One of the springs in your oil pump is starting to go,” he said. “Here, come see for yourself.”
She inspected the part. Sure enough, it wasn’t as strong as it should have been. She nodded with professional respect. The German got into everything, with monomaniacal thoroughness. She couldn’t imagine a Russian technician stripping down a part that wasn’t giving trouble. “Do we have spares for it?” she asked.
“I think so, yes, or if not I can steal one from a plane that’s down for some other reason,” Schultz said. Ludmila nodded; cannibalizing machines for parts happened all the time.
“Good. Do that at once,” she said.
He gave her an odd look. “But I have not yet seen what else may need fixing,” he said. “What do you think I am, some slapdash Russian? Finding one thing wrong does not mean there will be no more.” After a moment, he grunted again, and pointed up into the greasy bowels of the engine. “Here. Look.”
Ludmila, who was close to twenty centimeters shorter, had to stand on tiptoe to see what he was talking about. As she did so, he turned his head and planted a quick kiss on her cheek. Then he ste
pped back, grinning. As his advances went, that one was downright gentlemanly. She shook her head, exhaling through her nose in exasperation. “You ought to know better than that by now.”
“Why? Maybe I’ll get lucky one of these days,” he said, altogether unabashed. He grinned at her. “After all, Major Jäger did.”
She hoped the light under the camouflage netting was too dim and gray for him to notice her flush, but if she’d seen him go red, he could probably see her. And she was sure she was red as fire now. She’d had a brief liaison with Jäger when she’d flown Foreign Commissar Molotov to Berchtesgaden while Jäger happened to be there to get a medal from Hitler for bringing explosive metal back to Germany.
“The major is a gentleman,” she said. “You—” She stopped in confusion. In the classless society the Soviet Union was building, you weren’t supposed to think or talk about gentlemen, let alone prefer them.
“Maybe,” Schultz said. “But I’m here and he’s not.”
Ludmila made a wordless sound of fury. She made it again when Schultz laughed at her, which only made him laugh harder. What she wanted to do was stalk indignantly out of the underground shelter. Wriggling out from under the camouflage net was a poor substitute, but it had to do.
A groundcrew man came hurrying over to smooth the netting and preserve the maskirovka. He said, “Comrade Pilot, they are ready to debrief you on your mission now.”
“Thank you,” she said, and hurried over to the underground bunkers that housed the air base’s personnel. More camouflage netting concealed the entrance. She pushed it aside to go in.
There had always been the hope that Colonel Karpov, the base commandant, would take her report, but no such luck. Behind a folding table in a chamber lit by four stinking candles sat Nikifor Sholudenko. She sighed internally; she and the NKVD man had come to the base together out of the Ukraine, so his presence here, like Schultz’s, was her own fault. That didn’t make him any easier to take.
Upsetting the Balance Page 9
