Striking the Balance (53 page)

“You Germans always think you’re the only ones who know anything about anything,” Ludmila told the
Wehrmacht
man with the lantern.

His mouth fell open. She’d heard that meant something among the Lizards, but for the life of her couldn’t remember what. She thought it was pretty funny, though. The German soldier turned around and exclaimed, “Hey, Colonel, would you believe it? They’ve got a girl flying this plane.”

“I’ve run into a woman pilot before,” the officer answered. “She was a very fine one, as a matter of fact.”

Ludmila sat in the unfamiliar seat of the
Storch.
Her whole body seemed to have been dipped in crushed ice—or was it fire? She couldn’t tell. She stared at the instrument panel—all the gauges hard against the zero pegs now—without seeing it. She didn’t realize she’d dropped back into Russian till the words were out of her mouth: “Heinrich . . .  . is that you?”

“Mein Gott,”
the officer said quietly, out there in the cricket-chirping darkness where she could not see him. She thought that was his voice, but she hadn’t seen him for a year and a half, and never for long at any one stretch. After a moment, he tried again: “Ludmila?”

“What the hell is going on?” asked the soldier with the lantern.

Ludmila got out of the Fieseler
Storch.
She needed to do that anyhow, to make it easier for the Germans to get the chests of ammunition into the aircraft. But even as her feet thumped down onto the ground, she felt she was flying far higher than any plane could safely go.

Jäger came up to her. “You’re still alive,” he said, almost severely.

The landing lamp didn’t give enough light. She couldn’t see how he looked, not really. But now that she was looking at him, memory filled in the details the light couldn’t: the way his eyes would have little lines crinkling at the corners, the way one end of his mouth would quirk up when he was amused or just thinking hard, the gray hair at his temples.

She took a step toward him, at the same time as he was taking a step toward her. That left them close enough to step into each other’s arms. “What the
hell
is going on?” the soldier with the lantern repeated. Ludmila ignored him. Jäger, his mouth insistent on hers, gave no sign he even heard.

From out of the night, a big, deep German voice boomed, “Well, this is sweet, isn’t it?”

Ludmila ignored that interruption, too. Jäger didn’t. He ended the kiss sooner than he should have and turned toward the man who was coming up—in the night, no more than a large, looming shadow. In tones of military formality, he said,
“Herr Standartenführer,
I introduce to you Lieutenant—”

“Senior Lieutenant,” Ludmila broke in.

“—Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova of the Red Air Force. Ludmila”—the formality broke down there—“this is
Standartenführer
Otto Skorzeny of the
Waffen
SS, my—”

“Accomplice.” Now Skorzeny interrupted. “You two are old friends, I see.” He laughed uproariously at his own understatement. “Jäger, you sneaky devil, you keep all sorts of interesting things under your hat, don’t you?”

“It’s an irregular sort of war,” Jäger answered, a little stiffly. Being “old friends” with a Soviet flier was likely to be as destructive to a
Wehrmacht
man’s career—and maybe to more than that—as having that sort of relationship with a German had been dangerous for Ludmila. But he didn’t try to deny anything, saying, “You’ve worked with the Russians, too, Skorzeny.”

“Not so—intimately.” The SS man laughed again. “But screw that, too.” He chucked Jäger under the chin, as if he were an indulgent uncle. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.” Whistling a tune that sounded as if it was probably salacious, he strolled back into the night.

“You—work with him?” Ludmila asked.

“It’s been known to happen,” Jäger admitted, his voice dry.

“How?” she said.

The question, Ludmila realized, was far too broad, but Jäger understood what she meant by it. “Carefully,” he answered, which made better sense than any reply she’d expected.

Mordechai Anielewicz had long since resigned himself to wearing bits and pieces of German uniforms. There were endless stocks of them in Poland, and they were tough and reasonably practical, even if not so well suited to winter cold as the ones the Russians made.

Dressing head to foot in
Wehrmacht
gear was something else again, he discovered. Taking on the complete aspect of the Nazi soldiers who had so brutalized Poland gave him a thrill of superstitious dread, no matter how secular he reckoned himself. But it had to be done. Bunim had threatened reprisals against the Jews if they tried to block Lizard movements through Lodz. Therefore, the attack would have to come outside of town, and would have to seem to come from German hands.

Solomon Gruver, also decked out in German uniform, nudged him. He had greenery stuck onto his helmet with elastic bands, and was almost invisible in the woods off to the side of the road. “They should hit the first mines soon,” he said in a low voice distorted by his gas mask.

Mordechai nodded. The mines were German, too, with casings of wood and glass to make them harder to detect. A crew charged with repairing the highway had done just that . . .  among other things. Over this stretch of a couple of kilometers, the Lizards would have a very bumpy ride indeed.

As usual, Gruver looked gloomy. “This is going to cost us a lot of men no matter what,” he said, and Anielewicz nodded again. Doing favors for the Germans was nothing he loved, especially after what the Germans had tried to do to the Jews of Lodz. But this favor, while it might help Germans like Heinrich Jäger, wouldn’t do Skorzeny or the SS any good. So Anielewicz hoped.

He peered through the eye lenses of his own gas mask toward the roadway. The air he breathed tasted flat and dead. The mask made him look like some pig-snouted creature as alien as any Lizard. It was German, too—the Germans knew all about gas warfare, and had been teaching it to the Jews even before the Lizards came.

Whump!
The harsh explosion announced a mine going off. Sure enough, a Lizard lorry lay on its side in the roadway, burning. From the undergrowth to either side of the road, machine guns opened up on it and on the vehicles behind it Farther off, a German mortar started lobbing bombs at the Lizard convoy.

A couple of mechanized infantry combat vehicles charged off the road to deal with the raiders. To Anielewicz’s intense glee, they both hit mines almost at once. One of them began to burn; he fired at the Lizards who emerged from it. The other slewed sideways and stopped, a track blown off.

The weapon with which Anielewicz hoped to do the most damage, though, involved no high explosives whatever: only catapults made with lengths of inner tube and wax-sealed bottles full of an oily liquid. As he and Gruver had learned, you could fling a bottle three hundred meters with old rubber like that, and three hundred meters was plenty far enough. From all sides, bottles of captured Nazi nerve gas rained down on the stalled head of the Lizard column. Still more landed farther down its length once the head had stalled. They didn’t all break, but a lot of them did.

Lizards started dropping. They weren’t wearing masks. The stuff could nail you if it got on your skin, too. Since they wore only body paint, the Lizards were also at a disadvantage there—not that ordinary clothing was any sure protection. Mordechai had heard that the Germans made special rubber-impregnated uniforms for their troops who dealt with gas all the time. He didn’t know for certain whether it was true. It sounded typically German in its thoroughness, but wouldn’t you stew like a chicken in a pot if you had to fight cooped up in a rubber uniform for more than an hour or two at a stretch?

“What do we do now?” Gruver asked, pausing to shove another clip into his
Gewehr
98.

“As soon as we’ve thrown all the gas we brought, we get out,” Anielewicz answered. “The longer we hang around, the better the chance the Lizards will capture some of us, and we don’t want that.”

Gruver nodded. “If we can, we have to bring our dead away, too,” he said. “I don’t know how smart the Lizards are about these things, but if they’re smart enough, they can figure out we’re not really Nazis.”

“There is that,” Mordechai agreed. The last time he’d been reminded of the obvious difference, Zofia Klopotowski had thought it was funny. Consequences springing from it would be a lot more serious here.

The catapult-propelled bottles of nerve gas had a couple of advantages over more conventional artillery: neither muzzle flash nor noise gave away the positions of the launchers. Their crews kept flinging bottles till they were all gone.

After that, the Jewish fighters pulled away from the road, their machine guns covering the retreat. They had several rendezvous points in the area: farms owned by Poles they could trust
(Poles we hope we can trust,
Mordechai thought as he neared one of them). There they got back into more ordinary clothes and stashed weapons of greater firepower than rifles. These days in Poland, you might as well have been naked as go out in public without a Mauser on your shoulder.

Mordechai slipped back into Lodz from the west, well away from the direction of the fighting. It wasn’t long past noon when he strolled into the fire station on Lutomierska Street. Bertha Fleishman greeted him outside the building: “They say there was a Nazi raid this morning, just a couple of kilometers outside of town.”

“Do they?” he answered gravely. “I hadn’t heard, though there was a lot of gunfire earlier in the day. But then, that’s so about one day in three.”

“It must have been that what’s-his-name—Skorzeny, that’s it,” Bertha said. “Who else would be crazy enough to stick his nose in the wasps’ nest?”

While they were standing there talking, the Order Police district leader who’d taken Anielewicz to Bunim approached the fire station. Oskar Birkenfeld still carried only a truncheon, and so waited respectfully for the rifle-toting Anielewicz to notice him. When Mordechai did, the man from the Order Police said, “Bunim requires your presence again, immediately.”

“Does he?” Anielewicz said. “Whatever for?”

“He’ll tell you that,” Birkenfeld answered, sounding tough—or as tough as he could when so badly outgunned. Anielewicz looked down his nose at him without saying anything. The Order Service man wilted, asking weakly, “Will you come?”

“Oh, yes, I’ll come, though Bunim and his puppets could stand to learn better manners,” Mordechai said. Birkenfeld flushed angrily. Mordechai patted Bertha Fleishman on the shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”

At his Bialut Market Square offices, Burnm stared balefully at Anielewicz. “What do you know of the Deutsche who severely damaged our advancing column this morning?”

“Not much,” he answered. “I’d just heard it was a Nazi attack when your pet policeman came to fetch me. You can ask him about it after I go; he heard me get the news, I think.”

“I shall ascertain this,” Bunim said. “So you deny any role in the attack on the column?”

“Am I a Nazi?” Anielewicz said. “Bertha Fleishman, the woman I was talking with when Birkenfeld found me, thinks that Skorzeny fellow might have had something to do with it. I don’t know that for a fact, but I’ve heard talk he’s here in Poland somewhere, maybe to the north of Lodz.” If he could do the SS man a bad turn, he would.

“Skorzeny?” Bunim flipped out his tongue but did not waggle it back and forth, a sign of interest among the Lizards. “Exterminating that one would be a whole clutch of eggs’ worth of ordinary Tosevites like you.”

“Truth, superior sir,” Mordechai said. If Bunim wanted to think he was bumbling and harmless, that was fine with him.

The Lizard said, “I shall investigate whether these rumors you report have any basis in fact. If they do, I shall bend every effort to destroying the troublesome male. Considerable status would accrue to me on success.”

Mordechai wondered whether that last was intended for him or if Bunim was talking to himself. “I wish you good luck,” he said, and, despite having led the raid on that column moving north against the Germans, he meant what he told the Lizard.

“Now we’re cooking with gas!” Omar Bradley said enthusiastically as he sat down in Leslie Groves’ office in the Science Building at the University of Denver. “You said the next bomb wouldn’t be long in coming, and you meant it.”

“If I told lies about things like that, you—or somebody—would throw my fanny out of here and bring in a man who delivered on his promises,” Groves answered. He cocked his head to one side. Off in the distance, artillery still rumbled. Denver did not look like falling, though, not now. “And you, sir, you’ve done a hell of a job defending this place.”

“I’ve had good help,” Bradley said. They both nodded, pleased with each other. Bradley went on, “Doesn’t look like we’ll have to use that second bomb anywhere near here. We can try moving it someplace else where they need it worse.”

“Yes, sir. One way or another, we’ll manage that,” Groves said. The rail lines going in and out of Denver had taken a hell of a licking, but there were ways. Break the thing down into pieces and it could go out on horseback—provided all the riders got through to the place where you needed all the pieces.

“I figure we will,” Bradley agreed. He started to reach into his breast pocket, but arrested the motion halfway through. “All this time and I still can’t get used to going without a smoke.” He let out a long, weary exhalation. “That should be the least of my worries—odds are I’ll live longer because of it.”

“Certainly seem longer, anyhow,” Groves said. Bradley chuckled, but sobered in a hurry. Groves didn’t blame him. He too had bigger worries than tobacco. He voiced the biggest one: “Sir, how long can we and the Lizards keep going tit for tat? After a while, there won’t be a lot of places left. If we keep on trading them the way we have been.”

“I know,” Bradley said, his long face somber. “Dammit, General, I’m just a soldier, same as you. I don’t make policy, I just carry it out, best way I know how. Making it is President Hull’s job. I’ll tell you what I told him, though. If you want to hear it.”