Striking the Balance (30 page)

He’d laughed. Back inside what had been the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, among his own people, laughter had come easily. “We didn’t get out from under the Nazis’ thumbs by being afraid to take chances,” he’d said. “What’s one more, among so many?” And so he’d prevailed, and so here he was, somewhere north of Lodz, not far from where Lizard control gave way to German.

And so here he was, regretting he’d come. Now, when the only people in the fields were Polish, everyone sent a stranger suspicious looks. He himself didn’t look like a stereotypical Jew, but he’d seen on previous travels that he couldn’t readily pass for a Pole among Poles, either.

“Fourth dirt road north of that miserable little town, go west, fifth farm on the left. Then ask for Tadeusz,” he muttered to himself. He hoped he’d counted the roads rightly. Was that little track supposed to be one, or not? He’d find out. His horse was ambling toward the fifth farmhouse on the left.

A big burly blond man in overalls was forking beet tops into a manger for his cows. He didn’t bat an eyebrow as Mordechai, German rifle slung over his shoulder, rode up. A Mauser identical to Anielewicz’s leaned against the side of the barn. The fellow in overalls could grab it in a hurry if he had to. He stabbed the pitchfork into the ground and leaned on it. “You want something?” he asked, his deep voice wary but polite.

“I’m looking for Tadeusz,” Anielewicz answered. “I’m supposed to tell him Lubomir says hello.”

“Fuck hello,” the Pole—presumably Tadeusz—said with a big, booming laugh. “Where’s the five hundred zlotys he owes me?”

Anielewicz swung down off his horse: that was the recognition signal he was supposed to get back. He stretched. His back creaked. He rubbed at it, saying, “I’m a little sore.”

“I’m not surprised. You ride like a clodhopper,” Tadeusz said without rancor. “Listen, Jew, you must have all sorts of weird connections. Leastways, I never heard of any other clipcocks a German officer was trying to get hold of.”

“A German officer?” For a moment, Mordechai simply stared. Then his wits started working again. “A panzer officer? A colonel?” He still didn’t trust the big Pole enough to name names.

Tadeusz’s head bobbed up and down, which made his bushy golden beard alternately cover and reveal the topmost brass fastener on his overalls. “That’s the one,” he said. “From what I gather, he would have come looking for you himself, except that would have given him away.”

“Given him away to whom? The Lizards?” Mordechai asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.

Now Tadeusz’s head went from side to side, and so did the tip of his beard. “I don’t think so. Way I got the story, it’s some other stinking Nazi he’s worried about.” The Pole spat on the ground. “To hell with all of ’em, I say.”

“To hell with all of ’em is easy to say, but we have to deal with some of them, though God knows I wish we didn’t,” Anielewicz said. Off to the north and east, artillery lire rumbled. Mordechai pointed in that direction. “You see? That’s the Germans, likely aiming at the railroad or the highway into Lodz. The Lizards have trouble getting supplies in there now, and a devil of a time fighting out of the place—not that we haven’t done our bit as far as that goes.”

Tadeusz nodded. Shaded by a shapeless, almost colorless cloth cap, his eyes—a startlingly bright blue—were very keen. Mordechai wondered if he’d been a peasant before the war broke out, or perhaps something like an army major. Under the German occupation, Polish officers had had plenty of incentive to make themselves invisible.

His suspicion gained intensity when Tadeusz said, “The Lizards won’t just be having trouble bringing in military supplies, either. Your people will be getting hungry by and by.”

“That’s so,” Mordechai admitted. “Rumkowski’s noticed it—he’s hoarding everything he can for the bad times ahead. The bastard will lick the boots of anybody over him, but he can smell trouble, I give the
alter kacker
that much.”

Tadeusz had no trouble understanding the couple of words of Yiddish in the middle of the Polish conversation. “Not the worst thing for a man to be able to do,” he remarked.

“No,” Anielewicz said reluctantly. He tried to wrench matters back to those at hand. “Do you have any idea who this other Nazi is? If I knew that, I might have a better notion of why the panzer officer was trying to warn me. What do you know?”
What will you tell me?
If Tadeusz was a Polish officer lying low, he was liable to have the full measure of aristocratic contempt for Jews. If, on the other hand, he really was a peasant, he was even more liable to have a simple but even more vivid hatred running through his veins.

And yet. If that were so, he wouldn’t have relayed Jäger’s message in the first place. Mordechai couldn’t let his own ingrained distrust of the Poles get in the way of the facts. Now Tadeusz tugged at his beard before answering, “You have to remember, I got this fourth, maybe fifth-hand. I don’t know how much of it to trust myself.”

“Yes, yes,” Anielewicz said impatiently. “Just tell me whatever you got, and I’ll try and put the pieces together. This German could hardly rig up a field telephone and call right into Lodz, now could he?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Tadeusz said, and Mordechai, remembering some of his own telephone calls out of the city, had to nod. The Pole went on, “All right, this is everything I got told: whatever’s going to happen—and I don’t know what that is—it’s going to happen in Lodz, and it’s going to happen to you Jews in Lodz. Word is, they’ve brought in some kind of an SS man with a whole bunch of notches on his gun to do the job.”

“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard of,” Mordechai said. “It’s not just that we’re not doing anything to the Nazis: we’re helping them, for God’s sake. The Lizards haven’t been able to do much of anything out of Lodz, and it isn’t because they haven’t tried.”

Tadeusz looked at him with what he first took for scorn and then realized was pity. “I can give you two good reasons why the Nazis are doing what they’re doing. For one thing, you’re Jews, and then, for another thing, you’re Jews. You know about Treblinka, don’t you?” Without waiting for Anielewicz to nod, he finished, “They don’t care about what you do; they care about what you are.”

“Well, I won’t say you’re wrong,” Anielewicz replied. He had a Polish Army canteen on his belt. He took it off, removed the stopper, and offered it to Tadeusz. “Here. Wash the taste of that out of your mouth.”

The Pole’s larynx worked as he took several long, blissful swallows.
Shikker iz ein goy,
ran through Mordechai’s head: the gentile is a drunk. But Tadeusz stopped before the canteen was empty and handed it back to him. “If that’s not the worst applejack I’ve ever drunk, I don’t know what is.” He thumped his belly; the sound was like someone hitting a thick, hard plank. “Even the worst, though, is a damn sight better than none.”

Mordechai swigged from the canteen. The raw spirit charred its way down his gullet and exploded like a 105mm shell in his stomach. “Yeah, you could strip paint with just the fumes from that, couldn’t you? But you’re not wrong—as long as it has the kick, that’s what you need.” He could feel his skin flush and his heart start racing. “So what am I supposed to do when this SS man shows up in Lodz? Shooting him on the spot doesn’t sound like the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

Tadeusz’s eyes were slightly crossed. He’d taken a big dose on an empty stomach, and perhaps hadn’t realized how strong the stuff was till he’d got outside it. People who drank a lot were like that sometimes: they were used to strong, so they didn’t notice very strong till too late. The Pole’s eyebrows drew together as he tried to gather his wits. “What else did your Nazi chum say?” he wondered aloud.

“He’s no chum of mine,” Anielewicz said indignantly. But maybe that wasn’t true. If Jäger hadn’t thought something lay between them, he wouldn’t have sent a message, even a garbled one, into Lodz. Anielewicz had to respect that, whatever he thought of the uniform Jäger wore. He took another cautious sip of applejack and waited to see if Tadeusz’s brains would start working again.

After a while, they did. “Now I remember,” the Pole said, his face lighting up. “I don’t know how much to trust this, though—like I said, it came through a lot of mouths before it got to me.” What came through his mouth was a loud and unmistakable hiccup. “God and the Virgin and the saints only know if it came through the way it was supposed to.”

“Nu?”
Mordechai said, trying to get Tadeusz moving forward once more instead of sideways.

“All right, all right.” The Pole made pushing motions, as if to fend off his impatience. “If it came to me straight, what he said was that, next time you saw him, you shouldn’t believe anything he told you, because he’d be lying through his teeth.”

“He sent a message to tell me he’d be lying?” Anielewicz scratched his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Not my problem, God be praised,” Tadeusz answered. Mordechai glared at him, then turned, remounted his horse, and rode back toward Lodz without another word

VIII

Leslie Groves couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so far away from the Metallurgical Laboratory and its products. Now that he thought back on it, he hadn’t been away from the project since the day he’d taken that load of plutonium stolen first from the Lizards and then from the Germans off the HMS
Seanymph.
Ever since then, he’d lived, breathed, eaten, and slept atomic weapons.

And now here he was well east of Denver, miles and miles away from worrying about things like graphite purity and neutron absorption cross sections (when he’d taken college physics, nobody had ever heard of neutrons), and making sure you didn’t vent radioactive steam into the atmosphere. If you did, and if the Lizards noticed, you’d surely never get a second chance—and the United States would almost certainly lose the war.

But there were other ways to lose the war besides having a Lizard atomic bomb come down on his head. That was why he was out here: to help keep one of those other ways from happening. “Some vacation,” he muttered under his breath.

“If you wanted a vacation, General, I hate to tell you, but you signed up with the wrong outfit,” Lieutenant General Omar Bradley said. The grin on his long, horsey face took any sting from his words; he knew Groves did a platoon’s worth of work all by his lonesome.

“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. “What you’ve shown me impressed the living daylights out of me, I’ll tell you that. I just hope it looks as tough to the Lizards as it does to us.”

“You and me and the whole United States,” Bradley answered. “If the Lizards punch through these works and take Denver, we’re all in a lot of trouble. If they get close enough to put your facility under artillery fire, we’re in a lot of trouble. Our job is to make sure they don’t, and to spend the fewest possible lives making sure of that. The people of Denver have seen enough.”

“Yes, sir.” Groves said again. “Back in 1941, I saw newsreels of women and kids and old men marching out from Moscow with shovels on their shoulders to dig tank traps and trenches to hold off the Nazis. I never dreamt then that the same thing would happen here in the States one day.”

“Neither did I. Neither did anybody,” Bradley said. He looked tough and worn, an impression strengthened by his Missouri twang and by the M-1 he carried in place of the usual officer’s sidearm. He’d been a crack shot ever since the days when he went hunting with his father, and didn’t let anyone forget it. Scuttlebutt had it that he’d used the M-l to good effect, too, in the first counterattack against the Lizards in late 1942.

“We have more going for us than the Red Army did then,” Bradley said. “We weren’t just shoving dirt around.” He waved to show what he meant, continuing, “The Maginot Line isn’t a patch on these works. This is defense in depth, the way the Hindenburg Line was in the last war.” He paused again, this time to cough. “Not that I saw the Hindenburg Line, dammit, but I did study the reports on it most thoroughly.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said for the third time. He’d heard that Bradley was sensitive about not having gone Over There during World War I, and evidently the rumor machine had that one straight. He took a step up onto the parapet and looked around. “The Lizards’ll stub their snouts if they run up against this, no doubt about it.”

Bradley’s voice went grim. “That’s not an
if
, worse luck; it’s a
when.
We won’t stop ’em short of our works, not by the way they’ve broken out of Kansas and into Colorado. Lamar had to be evacuated the other day, you know.”

“Yes, I’d heard that,” Groves said. It had sent cold chills down his spine, too. “Looking at all this, though, I feel better than I did when the word came down.”

What man could do to turn gently rising prairie into real defensive terrain, man had done. Trenches and deep, broad antitank ditches ringed Denver to the east for miles around. Great belts of barbed wire would impede Lizard infantry. If not armor. Concrete pillboxes had been placed wherever the ground was suitable. Some of them held machine guns; others provided aiming points for bazooka men.

Along with the antitank ditches, tall concrete teeth and stout steel posts were intended to channel Lizard armor toward the men with the rockets that could destroy it. If a tank tried to go over those obstacles instead of around them, it would present its weaker belly armor to the antitank guns waiting for just that eventuality. Stretches of the prairie looked utterly innocent but were in fact sown with mines enough to make the Lizards pay a heavy price for crossing them.

“It all looks grand, that it does,” Bradley said. “I worry about three things, though. Do we have enough men to put into the works to make them as effective as they ought to be? Do we have enough munitions to make the Lizards say uncle if they strike us with everything they’ve got? And do we have enough food to keep our troops in the works day after day, week after week? The best answer I can up with for any of those is
I hope so.”

“Considering that any or all of them might be
no,
that’s a damn sight better than it might be,” Groves said.

“So it is, but it’s not good enough.” Bradley scratched his chin, then turned to Groves. “Your facilities have taken proper precautions?”

“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. He was pretty sure Bradley already knew that, but even three-star generals sometimes needed reassuring. “As soon as the bombing in and around Denver picked up, we implemented our deception plan. We lit bonfires by our most important buildings, and under cover of the smoke we put up the painted canvas sheets that make them look like ruins from the air. We haven’t had any strikes close by since, so for now it looks like the plan has paid off.”

“Good,” Bradley said. “It had better pay off. Your facility is why we’ll fight to the last man to hold Denver, and you know it as well as I do. Oh, we’d fight for it anyway—God knows we don’t want the Lizards stretching their hold all the way across the Great Plains—but with the Met Lab here, it’s not a town we want to have, it’s a town we have to have.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Groves said. “The physicists tell me we’ll have another little toy ready inside of a couple of weeks. We’ll want to hold the Lizards away from Denver without using it, I know, but if it comes down to using it or losing the town—”

“I was hoping you would tell me something like that, General,” Bradley answered. “As you say, we’ll do everything we can to hold Denver without resorting to nuclear weapons, because the Lizards do retaliate against our civilian population. But if it comes down to a choice between losing Denver and taking every step we can to keep it, I know what the choice will be.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Groves said. Bradley nodded.

Lizard planes screamed by. Antiaircraft guns hammered at them. Every once in a while, the guns brought down a fighter-bomber, too, but seldom enough that it wasn’t much more than dumb luck. Bombs hit the American works; the blasts boxed Groves’ ears.

“Whatever that was they hit, it’ll take a lot of pick-and-shovel work to set it right again.” Omar Bradley looked unhappy. “Hardly seems fair to the poor devils who have to do all the hard work to see the fruits of their labors go up in smoke that way.”

“Destroying is easier than building, sir,” Groves answered.
That’s why it’s easier to turn out a soldier than an engineer,
he thought. He didn’t say that out loud. Giving the people who worked for you the rough side of your tongue could sometimes spur them on to greater effort. If you got your superior angry at you, though, he was liable to let you down when you needed him most.

Groves pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully. In its own way, that was engineering, too.

Ludmila Gorbunova let her hand rest on the butt of her Tokarev automatic pistol. “You are not using me in the proper fashion,” she told the leader of the guerrilla band, a tough, skinny Pole who went by the name of Casimir. To make sure he couldn’t misunderstand it, she said it first in Russian, then in German, and then in what she thought was Polish.

He leered at her. “Of course I’m not,” he said. “You still have your clothes on.”

She yanked the pistol out of its holster: “Pig!” she shouted. “Idiot! Take your brain out of your pants and listen to me!” She clapped a hand to her forehead.
“Bozhemoi!
If the Lizards paraded a naked whore around Hrubieszów, they’d lure you and every one of your skirt-chasing cockhounds out of the forest to be slaughtered.”

Instead of blowing up at her, he said, “You are very beautiful when you are angry,” a line he must have stolen from a badly dubbed American film.

She almost shot him on the spot.
This
was what she’d got for doing that
kulturny
General von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt a favor, a trip to a band of partisans who didn’t have the wits to clear all the trees out of their landing strip and who hadn’t the first clue how to employ the personnel who, for reasons often inscrutable to her, nonetheless adhered to their cause.

“Comrade,” she said, keeping things as simple as she could, “I am a pilot. I have no working aircraft here.” She didn’t bother pointing out—what was the use?—that the partisans hadn’t come up with a mechanic able to fix her poor
Kukuruznik,
which was to her the equivalent of failing kindergarten. “Using me as a soldier gives me less to do than I might otherwise. Do you know of any other aircraft I might fly?”

Casimir reached up under his shirt and scratched his belly. He was hairy as a monkey—
and not much smarter than one, either,
Ludmila thought. She expected he wouldn’t answer her, and regretted losing her temper—regretted it a little, anyway, as she would have regretted any piece of tactics that could have been better. At last, though, he did reply: “I know of a band that either has or knows about or can get its hands on some sort of a German plane. If we get you to it, can you fly it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If it flies, I can probably fly it. You don’t sound like you know much.” After a moment, she added, “About this airplane, I mean. What kind is it? Where is it? Is it in working order?”

“I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it is. Where? That I know. It is a long way from here, north and west of Warsaw, not far from where the Nazis are operating again these days. If you want to travel to it, this can probably be arranged.”

She wondered if there was any such plane, or if Casimir merely wanted to be rid of her. He was trying to send her farther away from the
rodina,
too. Did he want her gone because she was a Russian? There were a few Russians in his band, but they didn’t strike her as ideal specimens of Soviet manhood. Still. If the plane was where he said it was, she might accomplish something useful with it. She was long since convinced she couldn’t do that here.

“Khorosho,”
she said briskly: “Good. What sort of guides and passwords will I need to get to this mysterious aircraft?”

“I will need some time to make arrangements,” Casimir said. “They might go faster if you—” He stopped; Ludmila had swung up the pistol to point at his head. He did have nerve. His voice didn’t waver as he admitted, “On the other hand, they might not.”

“Khorosho,”
Ludmila said again, and lowered the gun. She hadn’t taken off the safety, but Casimir didn’t need to know that. She wasn’t even very angry at him. He might not be
kulturny,
but he did understand
no
when he stared down a gun barrel. Some men—Georg Schultz immediately sprang to mind—needed much stronger hints than that.

Maybe having a pistol pointed at his face convinced Casimir that he really did want to be rid of Ludmila. Two days later, she and a pair of guides—a Jew named Avram and a Pole called Wladeslaw—headed north and west in a beat-up wagon pulled by a beat-up donkey. Ludmila had wondered if she ought to get rid of her Red Air Force gear, but seeing what the Pole and the Jew wore put an end to that notion. Wladeslaw might have been a Red Army man himself, though he carried a German
Gewehr
98 on his back. And Avram’s hooked nose and stringy, graying beard looked particularly out of place under the brim of a coal-scuttle helmet some
Wehrmacht
man would never need again.