In the Balance (61 page)

As soon as she got a good look at the engine, she became certain this idiot mechanic walked on all fours. She reached up, asked, “Do you think this loose spark-plug wire might have something to do with the aircraft’s poor performance of late?” As she spoke, she connected the wire firmly.

The mechanic’s head bobbed up and down, as if on a string.
“Da
, Comrade Pilot, very likely it could.”

She wheeled on him. “Why didn’t you see it, then?” she shouted shrilly. She wished she were a man; she wanted to bellow like a bull.

“I’m sorry, Comrade Pilot.” The mechanic’s voice was humble, as if she were a priest who had caught him at some sordid little sin. “I am trying. I do the best I can.”

With that, Ludmila’s rage evaporated. She knew the fellow was telling the truth. The trouble was, his best just wasn’t good enough. The Soviet Union’s pool of skilled manpower had never been big enough to meet the country’s needs. The purges of the 1930s hadn’t helped, either; sometimes simply knowing something was enough to make one an object of suspicion. Then the Germans came, and after them the Lizards … Ludmila supposed it was a miracle any reliable technicians were left alive.
If
any were—she knew she hadn’t seen one lately.

She said, “We have here manuals for the
Kukuruznik
and its engine. Study them carefully, so we won’t have this kind of problem any more.”

“Da
, Comrade Pilot.” The mechanic’s head bobbed up and down again. Ludimila was dully certain they wouldn’t have this kind of problem any less, either. She wondered if the mechanic could read the manuals. Before the war, he’d probably been a tinker or a blacksmith at a
kolkhoz
, good enough at patching a pot or hammering out a new blade for a shovel. Whatever he’d been, he was hopelessly out of his depth when it came to engines.

“Do the best you can,” she told him, and left the shelter of the U-2’s enclosure. It had been cold in there. Away from the heaped banks of earth that shielded from blast, away from the roof of camouflage netting covered over with dead grass, the wind bit with full force, driving sleet into her face. She was glad for her flying clothes of fur and leather and thick cotton padding, for the oversized felt
valenki
that kept her feet from freezing. Now that winter was here, she seldom took anything off.

The
valenki
acted almost like snowshoes, spreading her weight as she squelched along the muddy edge of the equally muddy landing strip. Only the slush-filled ruts from her plane and others distinguished the runway from any other part of the steppe. Even more than most Soviet aircraft, the
Kukuruznik
was made to operate from landing fields that were fields in truth.

Her head came up; her right hand went to the pistol she wore on her hip. Someone not part of the battered Red Air Force detachment was trudging across the airstrip, very likely without realizing it was one. A Red Army man, maybe—he had a rifle slung across his back.

No, not a Red Army man: he wasn’t dressed warmly enough, and the cut of his clothes was wrong. Ludmila needed only a moment to recognize the nature of the wrongness; she’d seen it enough.
“Germanski!”
she yelled, half to call to the fellow, half to warn the rest of the Russians on the little base.

The German spun, grabbed for his rifle, flopped down on his belly in the mud.
A combat veteran
, Ludmila thought, unsurprised: most of the German soldiers still alive in the Soviet Union were the ones with reactions honed by battle. This one was also smart enough not to start blazing away before he knew what he’d walked into, even if his thick red whiskers gave him the look of a bandit.

Ludmila frowned. She’d seen whiskers like those before.
On the
kolkhoz,
that’s right
, she thought What had the fellow’s name been. “Schultz,” she murmured to herself. Then she shouted it, going on in German, “Is that you?”

“Ja
. Who are you?” the red-bearded man yelled back: like her, he needed a few seconds to make the connection. When he did, he exclaimed,
“You’re the pilot, right?” As it had back at the collective farm, the word sounded exotic with a feminine ending tacked onto it.

She waved for him to approach. He got to his feet; though he didn’t resling his rifle, he didn’t point it at her, either. He was grimy and ragged and looked cold: if not quite the pathetic Winter Fritz of Soviet propaganda, still a long way from the deadly-dangerous figure he’d seemed back in the summer. She’d forgotten how tall he was. He was skinnier than he had been, too, which further exaggerated his height.

He asked, “What are you doing here, out in the middle of nowhere?”

“This isn’t nowhere. This is an airfield,” she answered.

He looked around. There wasn’t much to see. He grinned impudently. “You Ivans really know how to camouflage things.”

She let that pass; she wasn’t sure whether it was a compliment or he was saying there wasn’t anything here worth hiding. She said, “I didn’t expect to see you again. I thought you and your major were on your way to Moscow.” As she spoke, she saw out of the corner of her eye that several pilots and mechanics had come out of their shelters and were watching her talk with the German. They all carried guns. No one who had fought the Nazis was inclined to trust them, not even now when the Soviet Union and Germany both faced the same foe.

“We were there,” Schultz agreed. He saw the Russians, too. His eyes were never still, not even for a second; he scanned everything around him, all the time. He unobtrusively shifted, his feet so Ludmila stood between him and most of her countrymen. With a wry smile, he went on, “Your people decided they’d rather have us go out and work for a living than sit around eating their kasha and borscht. So we did—and here I am.”

“Here you are,” she said, nodding. “Where is the major?”

“He was alive last I saw him,” Schultz answered. “We got separated; it was part of the operation. I hope he’s all right.”

“Yes,” Ludmila said. She still kept the letter Jager had sent her. She’d thought about answering, but hadn’t done it. Not only did she have no idea how to address a reply, but writing to a German would make another suspicious mark go down in her dossier. She’d never seen that dossier—she never would, unless charges were brought against her—but it felt as real as the sheepskin collar of her flying jacket.

Schultz said, “Anything to eat here? After what I’ve been stealing lately, even kasha and borscht would seem mighty fine.”

“We haven’t much for ourselves,” Ludmila answered. She didn’t mind feeding Schultz once or twice, but she didn’t want to turn him into a parasite, either. Then she had a new thought. “How good a mechanic are you?”

“Pretty good,” he said, not arrogant but confident enough. “I had to help keep my panzer running, after all.”

“Do you think you could work on an aircraft engine?”

He pursed his lips. “I don’t know. I never tried. Do you have the manuals for it?”

“Yes. They’re in Russian, though.” Ludmila switched to her own language: “You didn’t know any back at the
kolkhoz
. Do you understand it better now?”

“Da
, a little,” Schultz answered in Russian, his accent not too scurrilous. But he dropped back into German with every sign of relief: “I still can’t read it worth a damn, though. But numbers don’t change, and I can make sense out of pictures. Let me see what you have.”

“All right.” Ludmila led him back toward the U-2 she’d just left. Members of the ground crew watched with hard, mistrustful stares as she approached. Some of that mistrust was aimed at Ludmila, for having anything to do with a German. She thought about her dossier again. But she said, “I think he can help us. He knows engines.”

“Ah,” everyone said, almost in unison. Ludmila didn’t care for that much more than she liked the mistrustful stares. Along with hating and fearing Germans, too many Russians were in the habit of attributing nearly magical abilities to them just because they came from the west. She hoped she knew better. They were good soldiers, yes, but they weren’t supermen.

When Georg Schultz saw the
Kukuruznik
, he rocked back on his heels and started to laugh. “You’re still flying these little bastards, are you?”

“What about it?” Ludmila said hotly. He’d have done better to insult her family than her beloved U-2.

But the panzer man answered, “We hated these stupid things. Every time I had to go out and take a dump, I figured one of ’em would fly by and shoot my ass off. I swear they could stand on tiptoe and peek in through a window, and I bet the Lizards don’t like ’em one bit better’n we did.”

Ludmila translated that into Russian. As if by magic, the ground crew’s hostility melted. Hands fell away from weapons. Somebody dug out a pouch of
makhorka
and passed it to Schultz. He had some old newspaper in an inside pocket that hadn’t got wet. When he’d rolled himself a cigarette, a Russian gave him a light.

He shielded it with one hand from the drips that splattered down off the camouflage netting, walked around so he could get a good look at the engine and two-bladed wooden prop on the nose of the Wheatcutter. When he turned around, he wore a disbelieving grin. “It really flies?”

“It really flies,” Ludmila agreed gravely, hiding her own smile. She said it again in her own language. A couple of the mechanics laughed out loud. She returned to German: “Do you think you can help keep it flying?”

“Why not?” he said. “It doesn’t look near as bad as keeping a panzer going. And if that engine were any simpler, you’d run it off a rubber band like a kid’s toy.”

“Hmm,” Ludmila said, not sure she cared for the comparison. The little Shvetsov was made to be rugged as a mule, but surely that was something to be proud of, not to scorn. She pointed to Schultz. “Turn your back.”

“Jawohl!”
He clicked his heels as if she were a field marshal in red-striped trousers, and performed a smart about-turn.

She gestured for a couple of Russians to stand behind him so he couldn’t see what she was doing, then loosened the sparkplug wire she’d noticed and her alleged mechanic hadn’t. “You can turn back now. Find out what’s wrong with the machine.”

Schultz walked over to the U-2, inspected the engine for perhaps fifteen seconds, and fixed the wire Ludmila had tampered with. His smile seemed to say,
Why don’t you ask me a hard one next time?
The mechanic who had failed to find the same defect glared at the German as if suspecting the devil’s grandmother had somehow migrated from the Shvetsov to him.

“This man will be useful on this base,” Ludmila said. Her eyes dared the ground crew to argue with her. None of the men said anything, though several looked ready to burst with what they weren’t saying.

The German panzer sergeant seemed at least as bemused as his Soviet counterparts. “First I fight alongside a bunch of Jewish partisans, and now I’m joining the Red Air Force,” he said, maybe more to himself than to Ludmila. “I hope to God none of this ever shows up in my file.”

So the Nazis worried about dossiers, too. The thought gave Ludmila something in common with Schultz, though it wasn’t one she’d be able to share with him. Somehow that didn’t matter, either. They both knew what was safe to talk about and what wasn’t.

Schultz also knew what the hostile looks he was getting meant. He undid his canteen, tossed it to the mechanic who was glaring hardest.
“Vodka, russki vodka,”
he said in his pidgin Russian. He smacked his lips.
“Ochen khorosho.”

The startled groundcrew man undid the stopper, sniffed, then grinned and enfolded Schultz in a bear hug. “That was clever,” Ludmila said as the ground crew passed the flask from one eager hand to the next. A moment later, she added, “Your Major Jäger would have approved.”

“Do you think so?” She’d found the right praise with which to reach him—his long, bony face glowed as if he were a small boy who’d just been told he’d written his school’s prize essay for the year. He went on, “The major, miss, I think he’s one hell of a man.”

“Yes,” Ludmila said, and realized she and Schultz might have something else in common after all.

14