From across the chest, less than a meter away, his Jewish yokemate watched him flounder. Watching Max watch him only made Jäger flounder harder. If Jews could flip-flop from enemies of the Reich to comrades-in-arms, that just made massacring them all the harder to stomach.
Max’s voice was sly. “You maybe have a fucking conscience?”
“Of course I have a conscience,” Jäger said indignantly. Then he shut up again. If he had a conscience, as he’d automatically claimed, how was he supposed to ignore what Germany might well have been doing? (Even in his own mind, he didn’t want to phrase it any more definitely than that.)
To his relief, the woods started thinning out ahead. That meant the most dangerous part of the mission—crossing open country with what they’d stolen from the Lizards—lay ahead. Beside the abyss whose edge he’d been treading with Max, physical danger suddenly seemed a welcome diversion. As long as be was putting his own life on the line, he’d be too busy to look down into the abyss and see the people piled there with neat holes in the backs of their necks.
The survivors of the raiding party gathered near the edge of the trees. Skorzeny took charge of them. From under the thick layer of dead leaves, he pulled out several chests which looked the same as the one Jäger and Max carried but were not lead-lined. “Two men to each one,” he ordered, pausing to let the Russian partisans who understood German translate for those who didn’t. “We scatter now, two by two, to make it as hard as we can for the Lizards to figure out who has the real one.”
One of the partisans said, “How do we know the real one will go where it’s supposed to?”
All the worn, dirty men, Russians and Germans alike, nodded at that. They still had no great trust in one another; they’d fought too hard for that. Skorzeny said, “We have one from each side holding the prize. The panje wagon that’s waiting for them has one from each side, too. If they don’t try to murder each other, we’ll be all right, ja?”
The SS man laughed to show he’d made a joke. Jäger looked over to Max. The Jew was not laughing. He wore the expression Jäger had often seen on junior officers who faced a tough tactical problem: he was weighing his options. That meant Jäger had to weigh his, too.
Skorzeny said, “We’ll go out one pair at a time. The team with the real chest will go third.”
“Who told you you were God?” a partisan asked.
The SS man’s scarred cheek crinkled as he gave an impudent grin. “Who told you I wasn’t?” He waited a moment to see if he got any more argument. When he didn’t, he swatted a man from the pair closest to him on the shoulder and shouted “Go! Go! Go!” as if they were paratroopers diving out of a Ju-52 transport plane.
The second pair followed a moment later. Then Skorzeny yelled “Go! Go! Go!” again and Jäger and Max burst out of the woods and started off toward the promised panje wagon. It waited several kilometers north and west, outside the Lizards’ tightest security zone. Jäger wanted to sprint the whole way. Slogging through mud carrying a heavy chest, that wasn’t practical.
“I’m fucking sick of rain,” Max said, though he knew as well as Jäger that the snow which would follow was even harder to endure.
Jäger said, “Right now I don’t mind rain at all. The Lizards will have a harder time chasing us through it than they would on dry ground. The low clouds will make us harder to spot through the air, too. If you want to get right down to it, I wouldn’t mind fog, either.”
“I would,” Max said. “We’d get lost.”
“I have a compass.”
“Very efficient,” Max said dryly. Jäger took it for a compliment until he remembered it was the word the Jew had used to describe the assembly-line murder at—what was the name of the place?—at Babi Yar, that was it.
Anger surged in the panzer major. The trouble was, he had trouble deciding whether to turn it on his own people for dishonoring the uniforms they wore or the Jew for telling him about it and making him notice it. He glanced over at Max. As usual, Max was watching him. He had no trouble finding a focus for his fury.
Jäger twisted his head, looked behind him. The driving rain had already obscured the woods. He could see one of the decoy pairs, but only one. He wouldn’t have wanted to track anyone in weather like this, and wished just as much trouble on the Lizards. They wouldn’t pursue in panzers, anyhow; from what he’d seen, their armor had at least as much trouble coping with Russian mud as the Wehrmacht did.
He must have been thinking aloud. Max grinned an unsympathetic grin and said, “You poor bogged-down bastards.”
“Fuck you, too, Max.” In the wrong tone of voice, that would have started the fight Skorzeny had not-quite-joked about. As it was, the Jewish partisan’s expression changed shape as if he, like Jäger, had to change some of his thinking.
Then both men’s faces congealed to fear. The Lizards had more helicopters in the air, and this time no flak cannon would stop them. Rifle shots rang out from back in the woods, but using a rifle against one of these machines was as magnificently futile as the Polish lancers’ charges against German panzers back when the war—the human war—was new.
But these rifle bullets did have some effect. The whistling roar of the copter rotors grew no louder. The deadly machines hovered over the trees. Their guns snarled. When they paused, more rifle fire announced that they hadn’t finished off all the raiders. The yarnmering resumed.
The sound from the helicopters changed. Jäger looked back, but could see nothing through the curtains of rain. He tried to be optimistic anyhow: “Maybe they’re settling down so they can comb through the woods—if they are, they’ll be looking in the wrong place.”
Max was less sanguine: “Don’t count on them to be so fucking stupid.”
“They aren’t what you’d call good soldiers, not in the tactical sense,” Jäger answered seriously. “They’re brave enough, and of course they have all that wonderful equipment, but ask them to do anything they haven’t planned out in advance and they start floundering around.” They’re even worse than Russians that way, he thought, but he kept quiet about that.
The strafing from the helicopters hadn’t slaughtered all the raiders. Rifles barked again; a Soviet submachine gun added its note to the din. Then, harsher and flatter, Lizard automatic small arms answered.
“They have landed troops!” Jäger exclaimed. “The longer they waste time back there, the better the chance the mission has of succeeding.”
“And the likelier they’ll kill off my friends,” Max said. “Yours too, I suppose. Does a fucking Nazi have friends? After a tough day shooting Jews in the back of the neck, do you go out and drink some beer with your Kameraden?”
“I’m a soldier, not a butcher,” Jäger said. He wondered whether Georg Schultz had got one of the dummy chests. If so, he was tramping through the mud, too. If not . . . He also wondered about Otto Skorzeny. The SS captain seemed to have a gift for creating impossible situations and then escaping from them. He’d need all that gift now. But thinking of the SS made Jäger think of Babi Yar. That would have been their doing; Wehrmacht men couldn’t have stomached it. He added, “You Russians have butchers, too.”
“So?” Max said. “Does that make you right?” Jäger found no good answer. The Jewish partisan went on, “I wish they’d sent me to the gulag in Siberia years before you fucking Germans ever got to Kiev. Then I wouldn’t have had to see what I saw.”
Further argument cut off abruptly when Jäger fell headlong into the muck. Max helped him haul himself to his feet. They pushed on. Jäger felt as if he were a hundred years old. A kilometer through this clinging goo was worse than a day’s march on hard, dry ground. He wistfully wondered whether the Soviet Union contained so much as a square centimeter of hard, dry ground at the moment.
He also wondered for what the soft, wet ground over which he was fleeing had been used. In Germany, land had a clearly defined purpose: meadow, crops, forest, park, town. This stretch met no such criteria. It was just land—raw terrain. Of t
hat the Soviet Union had unending inefficient abundance.
Jäger abruptly cut off his disparaging thoughts about Soviet inefficiency. His head went up like a hunted animal’s. The tiny, atrophied muscles in his ears tried to make them prick like a cat’s. Lizard helicopters were in the air again. “We have to move faster,” he said to Max.
The partisan pointed to his own trousers, which were covered in mud up to the knees. He dismissed Jäger’s suggestion with three sardonic words: “Good fucking luck.”
Rationally, Jäger knew Max was right. Still, as the whirring drone from the sky grew louder, he wanted to drop the heavy chest and run. He looked over his shoulder. The driving rain veiled the helicopter from sight. He could only hope it helped hide him from the Lizards.
Off to the south, from the middle of this big open field, shots cracked; Jäger recognized the deep bark of a Gewehr-98K, the standard German infantry rifle (no way to tell now, of course, whether it was borne by a standard German infantryman or a very definitely nonstandard Russian partisan). The helicopter that had been closest to him droned off to meet the fleabite challenge.
“I think some of the decoys just drew them away from us,” Jäger said.
“It might be a Jew saving your neck, Nazi. How does that make you feel?” Max said. After a moment, though, he added in wondering tones, “Or it might be a fucking Nazi saving mine. How does that make me feel? You know the word verkakte, Nazi? This is a verkakte mess, and no mistake.”
A village—maybe even a small town—loomed out of the rain ahead. In instant unspoken agreement, both men swerved wide around it. “What’s the name of that place?” Jäger asked.
“Chernobyl, I think,” Max said. “The Lizards drove the people out after their ship blew up, but they might keep a little garrison there.”
“Let’s hope they don’t,” Jäger said. The Jewish partisan nodded.
If the village held a garrison, it didn’t come forth to search for the raiders . . . or maybe it did, and simply missed Jäger and Max in the downpour. Once past the clump of ugly wooden buildings and even uglier concrete ones, Jäger glanced down at his compass to get back onto the proper course.
Max watched him put it back in his pocket “How are we going to find the fucking panje wagon?”
“We keep on this heading until—”
“—we walk past them in the rain,” the Jew put in.
“If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” Jäger said icily.
“I don’t. I was hoping you did.”
They pushed on, skirting another small patch of woods and then returning to the course the compass dictated. Jäger had a piece of black bread and some sausage in his pack. Getting them out one-handed was awkward, but he managed. He broke the bread, bit the sausage in half; and passed Max his share. The Jew hesitated but ate. After a while, he pulled a little tin flask from his hip pocket. He yanked out the cork, gave the flask to Jäger for the first swig. Vodka ran down his throat like fire.
“Thanks,” he said. “That’s good.” He put his thumb over the opening so the rain couldn’t get in, passed the flask back to Max.
Off to one side, somebody spoke up in Russian. Jäger started, then dropped the chest that had become like an unwelcome part of him and grabbed for the rifle slung on his back. Then a German voice added, “Ja, we could use something good about now.”
“You found them,” Max said to Jäger as the panje wagon came up through the muck. “That’s fucking amazing.” Instead of hatred, he looked at Jäger with something like respect. Jäger, who was at least as surprised as the Jewish partisan, did his best not to show it.
The horse that pulled the panje wagon had seen better days. The light wooden wagon itself rode on large wheels; it was low, wide, and flat-bottomed, so it could float almost boatlike across the surface of even the deepest mud. It looked as if its design hadn’t changed for centuries, which was probably true; no vehicle was better adapted to coping with Russia’s twice-yearly rasputitsa.
The driver and the fellow beside him both wore Red Army greatcoats, but instead of a shelm, a Russian cloth helmet rather like a balaçlava, the man who wasn’t holding the reins had on the long-brimmed cap of a German tropical-weight uniform. The weather was anything but tropical, but the cap kept the rain out of his eyes.
He said, “You have the cabbages?”
“Yes, by God, we do,” Jäger said. Max nodded. Together, they lifted the lead-lined chest into the wagon. Jäger had grown so used to the burden that his shoulder ached when he was relieved of it. Max handed the flask of vodka to the driver, then clambered up over the side of the wagon. Jäger followed him. Between them, they almost filled the wagon bed.
The fellow with the shelm spoke in Russian. Max turned it into Yiddish for Jäger. “He says we won’t bother with roads. We’ll head straight across country. The Lizards aren’t likely to find us that way.”
“And if they do?” Jäger asked.
“Nichevo,” the Russian answered when Max put the question to him: “It can’t be helped.” Since that was manifestly true, Jäger just nodded. The driver twitched the reins, clucked to the horse. The panje wagon began to roll.
“It’s true,” Yi Min declared. “I floated through the air light as a dandelion seed in the little scaly devils’ airplane, and it flew so high that I looked down on the whole world.” The apothecary conveniently forgot to mention—in fact, he’d just about made himself forget altogether—how sick he’d been while he floated light as a dandelion seed.
“And what did the world look like when you looked down on it?” one of his listeners asked.
“The foreign devils are right, believe it or not—the world is round, like a ball,” Yi Min answered. “I have seen it with my own eyes, so I know it is so.”
“Ahh,” some of the men said who sat crosslegged in front of him, either impressed at his eyewitness account or astonished that Europeans could be right about anything. Others shook their heads, disbelieving every word he said. Foolish turtles, he thought. He’d had a lot of lies taken for granted in his time; now that he was telling nothing but the truth, half the people in the scaly devils’ prisoner compound made him out to be a liar.
In any case, his audience hadn’t gathered to hear him talk about the shape of the world. A man in a blue cotton tunic said, “Tell us more about the women the little scaly devils gave to you.” Everyone, believers and skeptics alike, spoke up in favor of that; even if Yi Min were to lie about it, he’d still be amusing.
The best part was, he didn’t need to lie. “I had a woman whose skin was black as charcoal all over, save only the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. And I had another who was pale as milk, even her nipples only pink, with eyes of fine jade and hair and bush the color of a fox’s fur.”
“Ahh,” the men said again, imagining it One of them asked, “Did their strangeness make them better on the mat?”
“Neither of those two was particularly skilled,” Yi Min said, and his audience sighed with disappointment. He quickly added, “Still, their being so different to look at was piquant, like pickle after sweet. If you ask me, the gods first made the black folk, but left them in the oven too long. Then they tried again, but took the white folk—the foreign devils most of us had seen—out too soon. Finally they made us Chinese, and cooked us to perfection.”
The men who listened to him laughed; some of them clapped their hands. Then the fellow in the blue tunic said, “From what oven did the gods take the little scaly devils?”
Nervous silence fell. Yi Min said, “To know that for certain, you would have to ask the little devils themselves. If you want to know what I think, my guess is that a whole different set of gods made them. Why, do you know they have a mating season like, cattle or songbirds, and are impotent all the rest of the year?”
“Poor devils,” several men chorused, the first sympathy Yi Min had heard for the Lizards.
“It’s true,” he insisted. “That’s why they took me up into thei
r airplane that never lands in the first place: to see for themselves that real human beings could mate at any season of the year.”
His smile was very nearly a leer. “I proved it to their satisfaction—and to mine.”
He smiled again, this time happily, at the grins and laughter his words won. Being back among people with whom he could speak, back among people who appreciated his undoubted cleverness, was the greatest joy in returning to the ground after so long aloft.
Then a bald old fellow who sold eggs said, “Didn’t the little devils also kidnap that pretty girl who was living in your tent? Why didn’t she come back with you?”
“They wanted to keep her up there,” Yi Min answered, shrugging. “Why, I don’t know; they would not tell me. What does it matter? She’s only a woman.”
He was just as glad Liu Han remained with the scaly devils. she’d been a pleasant convenience to him, certainly, but no more than that. And she’d seen him sick and vulnerable while he floated without weight, a weakness he was doing his best to pretend had never happened. Now, with the prestige of his journey and the connections he retained with the little scaly devils, women both prettier and more willing than Liu Han were happy to share his mat. He sometimes wondered what the little devils were doing to her, but his curiosity remained abstract.
Bowing as he sat, he said, “I do hope I’ve held your interest, my friends, and that you’ll reward me for helping you pass an idle hour.”
The gifts the audience gave were about what he’d expected: a little cash, a pair of old sandals that wouldn’t fit him but which he could trade for something he wanted, some radishes, a smoked duck breast wrapped in paper and tied with string, a couple of tiny pots filled with ground spices. He lifted their lids, sniffed, smiled appreciatively. Yes, he’d been paid well for entertaining.
Turtledove: World War Page 41
