Striking the Balance (70 page)

“So I tell myself, over and over,” Atvar said. “I still have trouble being convinced. Seeing how the Tosevites have improved their own technology in the short time since we arrived here, I wonder how advanced they will be when the colonization Fleet finally reaches this world.”

“Computer projections indicate we will retain a substantial lead,” Kirel said soothingly. “And the only other path open to us, it would appear, is the one Straha the traitor advocated: using our nuclear weapons in prodigal fashion to smash the Big Uglies into submission—which also, unfortunately, involves smashing the planetary surface.”

“I no longer trust the computer projections,” Atvar said. “They have proved wrong too often; we do not know the Big Uglies well enough to model and extrapolate their behavior with any great hope of accuracy. The rest, however, is as you say, with the ironic proviso that the Tosevites care much less about the destruction of major portions of their world than we do. That has let them wage unlimited warfare against us, while we of necessity held back.”

“ ‘Has let them’?” Kirel said. “ ‘Held back’? Am I to infer, Exalted Fleetlord, you purpose a change in policy?”

“Not an active one, only reactive,” Atvar answered. “If the Deutsche, for example, carry out the threats their Leader has made through this von Ribbentrop creature and resume nuclear warfare against us, I shall do as I warned and thoroughly devastate Deutsch-held territory. That will teach whatever may be left of the Deutsche that we are not to be trifled with, and should have a salutary effect on the behavior of other Tosevite not-empires.”

“So it should, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed. He was too tactful to remark on how closely the plan resembled the one Straha had advocated, for which the fleetlord silently thanked him. Instead, he continued, “I cannot imagine the Deutsch Tosevites taking such a risk in the face of our clear and unmistakable warnings, however.”

“As a matter of fact, neither can I,” Atvar said. “But, with the Big Uglies, the only certain thing is uncertainty.”

Heinrich Jäger looked around with something approaching wonder. He could not see all the panzers and other armored lighting vehicles in his regiment, of course; they were concealed along the front on which they were to attack. But he’d never expected to come so close to establishment strength, never expected to be so fully loaded with both petrol and ammunition.

He leaned out of the cupola of his Panther and nodded to Otto Skorzeny. “I wish we weren’t doing this, but if we do it, we’ll do it well.”

“Spoken like a soldier,” said an SS man standing near Skorzeny. The boys in the black shirts had drifted back up to the front line over the past few days. If Lizard Intelligence was up to keeping track of their movements, Jäger would be feeding his regiment into a sausage machine. He didn’t think the Lizards were that smart, and hoped he was right. The SS man went on, “It is every officer’s duty, just as it is that of every soldier, to obey the commands of his superiors and of the
Führer
without question, regardless of his personal feelings.”

Jäger stared down at the jackbooted ignoramus in silent scorn. Take his words to the logical extreme and you’d turn the
Wehrmacht
into a bunch of automata as inflexible as the Russians or the Lizards. If you got orders that made no sense, you questioned them. If they still didn’t make sense, or if they led you into an obvious catastrophe, you ignored them.

You needed guts to do it. You put your career on the line when you disobeyed orders. But if you could convince your superiors you’d been right, or that the orders you’d got showed no real understanding of the situation in front of you, you’d survive. You might even get promoted.

Jäger, now, hadn’t just disobeyed orders. If you wanted to look at things in a particular light, he’d given aid and comfort to the enemy. Any SS man who found out about what he’d done would look at it in that particular light.

For his part, he studied the weedy little fellow standing there beside Skorzeny. Had he dropped his pants and enjoyed himself with Karol’s wife, or maybe with his young daughter, while a couple of others held her down? Was he the one who’d carved SS runes into the Polish farmer’s belly? And what, in his agony, had Karol said? Was this smiling chap just waiting for the bomb to go off before he arrested Jäger and started carving runes into him?

Skorzeny glanced down at his wristwatch. “Soon now,” he said. “When it goes up, we move, and the signal goes out to our armies on the other fronts, too. The Lizards will be sorry they didn’t give in to our demands.”

“Yes, and what happens afterwards?” Jäger asked as he had before, still hoping he could talk Skorzeny out of pushing the fateful button. “We can be sure the Lizards will destroy at least one city of the German
Reich.
They’ve done that every time anyone used an explosive-metal bomb against them in war. But this isn’t just war—it’s breaking a cease-fire. Aren’t they liable to do something worse?”

“I don’t know,” Skorzeny said cheerfully. “And you know what else? I don’t give a fuck, either. We’ve been over this ground already. The job the
Führer’s
given me is kicking the Lizards and the Jews in the balls, just as hard as I can. That’s what I’m going to do, too. Whatever happens afterwards, it damn well happens, that’s all, and I’ll worry about it then.”

“That is the National Socialist way of thought,” the other SS man declared, beaming at Skorzeny.

Skorzeny wasn’t looking back on him. The
Standartenführer’s
eyes were on Jäger instead, up there in the cupola (the engineers and mechanics had been right—it was a vastly improved cupola) of the Panther. Without giving his black-shirted colleague a hint of what he was thinking, he made his opinion plain to the panzer colonel. If it wasn’t,
What a load of pious crap,
Jäger would have eaten his service cap.

And yet, even if Skorzeny didn’t give a damn about the slogans under which he fought, they remained valid for him. Hitler flew him like a falcon at chosen foes. And, like a falcon, he didn’t worry about where he was flying or for what reasons, only about how to strike the hardest blow when he got there.

That wasn’t enough.

Jäger had fought the same way himself, till he’d had his eyes forcibly opened to what Germany had done to the Jews in the lands it had overrun, and to what it would have done had the arrival of the Lizards not interrupted things. Once your eyes were opened, shutting them again wasn’t easy. Jäger had tried, and failed.

He’d also—cautiously—tried to open the eyes of some other officers, Skorzeny among them. Without exception, everybody else had stayed willfully blind, not wanting to see, not wanting to discuss. He understood that. He even sympathized with it
if
you refused to notice the flaws of your superiors and your country, you could go on about your daily routine a lot more easily.

As long as he was fighting just the Lizards, Jäger had no trouble suppressing his own doubts, his own worries. Nobody could doubt for even a moment that the Lizards were deadly foes not only to Germany but to all mankind. You did what you had to do to stop them. But the explosive-metal bomb in Lodz didn’t have only the Lizards in mind. It didn’t even have the Lizards primarily in mind. Skorzeny knew as much. He’d set it there after the nerve-gas bomb he’d intended for the Jews of Lodz failed. It was his—and Germany’s—revenge on the Jews for thwarting him once.

Try as Jäger would, he couldn’t stomach that.

Skorzeny walked away, whistling. When he came back, he was wearing a pack like the one a wireless operator carried. In fact, it undoubtedly was a wireless operator’s pack. The handset that went with it, though, was anything but standard issue. It had only two elements: a bar switch and a large red button.

“I make the time 1100 hours,” Skorzeny said after yet another glance at his watch.

The other SS man brought his right wrist up toward his face. “I confirm the time as 1100 hours,” he said formally.

Skorzeny giggled. “Isn’t this fun?” he said. The other SS man stared at him: that wasn’t in the script. Jäger just snorted. He’d seen too many times that Skorzeny was indifferent to the script. The big SS man flipped the bar switch 180 degrees. “The transmitter is now active,” he said.

“I confirm that the transmitter has been activated,” the other SS man droned.

And then Skorzeny broke the rules again. He reached up and gave Jäger the handset, asking, “Do you want to do the honors?”

“Me?” Jäger almost dropped it. “Are you out of your mind? Good God, no.” He handed the device back to Skorzeny. Only after he’d done so did he realize he
should
have dropped it, or else contrived to smash it against the side of the panzer.

“All right, don’t let it worry you,” Skorzeny said. “I can kill my own dog. I can kill a whole great lot of sons of bitches.” His thumb came down hard on the red button.

XVIII

Even had the weather been cool, Vyacheslav Molotov would have been steaming as he stood around in the lobby of the Semiramis Hotel waiting for a Lizard armored personnel carrier to convey him to Shepheard’s.

“Idiocy,” the Soviet foreign commissar muttered to Yakov Donskoi. Where von Ribbentrop was concerned, he did not bother holding his scorn in check. “Idiocy, syphilitic paresis, or both. Probably both.”

Von Ribbentrop, waiting for his own armored personnel carrier, might well have been in earshot, but he didn’t speak Russian. Had he spoken Russian, Molotov would have changed not a word. The interpreter glanced over to the German foreign minister, then, almost whispering himself, replied, “It is most irregular, Comrade Foreign Commissar, but—”

Molotov waved him to silence. “But me no buts, Yakov Beniaminovich. Since we came here, the Lizards have convened all our sessions, as is only proper. For that arrogant Nazi to demand a noon meeting—” He shook his head. “I thought it was mad dogs and Englishmen who went out in the noonday sun, not a mad dog of a German.”

Before Donskoi could say anything to that, several personnel carriers pulled up in front of the hotel. The Lizards didn’t seem happy about ferrying all the human diplomats to Shepheard’s at the same time, but von Ribbentrop hadn’t given them enough notice of this meeting upon which he insisted for them to do anything else.

When the negotiators reached Atvar’s headquarters, Lizard guards made sure Molotov did not speak to Marshall or Eden or Togo before entering the meeting room. They also made sure he did not speak to von Ribbentrop. That was wasted labor; he had nothing to say to the German foreign minister.

Precisely at noon, the Lizard fleetlord came into the meeting room, accompanied by his interpreter. Through that male, Atvar said, “Very well, speaker for the not-empire of Deutschland, I have agreed to your request for this special session at this special time. You will now explain why you made such a request. I listen with great attentiveness.”

It had better be good,
was what he meant. Even through two interpreters, Molotov had no trouble figuring that out. Von Ribbentrop heard it through only one, so it should have been twice as clear to him.

If it was, he gave no sign. “Thank you, Fleetlord,” he said as he got to his feet. From the inside pocket of his jacket, he pulled out a folded sheet of paper and, as portentously as he could, unfolded it “Fleetlord, I read to you a statement from Adolf Hitler,
Führer
of the German
Reich.”

When he spoke Hitler’s name, his voice took on a reverence more pious than the Pope (back before the Pope had been blown to radioactive dust) would have used in mentioning Jesus. But then, why not? Von Ribbentrop thought Hitler was infallible; when he’d made the German-Soviet nonaggression pact the fascists had so brutally violated, he’d declared to the whole world, “The
Führer
is always right.” In such opinions, unlike diplomacy, he lacked the duplicity needed to lie well.

Now, in pompous tones, he went on, “The
Führer
declares that, as the Race has intolerably occupied territory rightfully German and refuses to leave such territory regardless of the illegitimacy of that occupation, the
Reich
is fully justified in taking the strongest measure against the Race, and has now initiated those measures. We—”

Molotov knew a sinking sensation at the pit of his stomach. So the Nazi had had a reason for summoning everyone. The fascist regime had launched another sneak attack and was now, in a pattern long familiar, offering some trumped-up rationale for whatever its latest unprovoked act of aggression had been.

Sure enough, von Ribbentrop continued, “—have emphasized our legitimate demands by the detonation of this latest explosive-metal bomb, and by the military action following it. God will give the German
Reich
the victory it deserves.” The German foreign minister refolded the paper, put it away, and shot out his right arm in the Nazi salute.
“Heil
Hitler!”

Anthony Eden, Shigenori Togo, and George Marshall all looked as shaken as Molotov felt. So much for the popular front: Hitler had consulted with no one before resuming the war. He and, all too likely, everyone else would have to pay the price.

Uotat finished hissing and popping and squeaking for Atvar. Molotov waited for the Lizard fleetlord to explode, and to threaten to rain down hideous destruction on Germany for what it had just done. The foreign commissar would have faced that prospect with considerable equanimity.

Instead, Atvar directed only a few words to the interpreter, who said, “The exalted fleetlord tells me to tell you he is looking into this statement.” As Uotat spoke, the fleetlord left the room.

He came back a few minutes later, and spoke several sentences to the translator. One by one, Uotat turned them into English. As he did so, Donskoi translated them into Russian for Molotov:

“The exalted fleetlord wonders why the negotiator for the not-empire of Deutschland has had us come here to listen to a statement bearing no resemblance to any sort of reality. No atomic explosion has occurred in or near Deutschland. No atomic explosion, in fact, has occurred anywhere on Tosev 3. No unusual military activity of any sort by Deutsch forces is noted. The exalted fleetlord asks whether your brain is addled, spokesmale von Ribbentrop, or that of your
Führer.”

Von Ribbentrop stared at Atvar. Along with the other human negotiators, Molotov stared at von Ribbentrop. Something had gone spectacularly wrong somewhere: that much was obvious. But what? And where?

Otto Skorzeny pressed down on the red button till his thumbnail turned white with the pressure. Heinrich Jäger waited for the southern horizon to light up with a brief new sun, and for the artillery barrage that would follow. Over the intercom, he spoke quietly to Johannes Drucker. “Be ready to start the engine.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberst,”
the panzer driver answered.

But the new sun did not rise. The mild Polish summer day continued undisturbed. Skorzeny jammed his thumb down on the button again. Nothing happened. “Christ on His cross,” the SS man muttered. Then, when that proved too weak to satisfy him, he ground out, “Goddamned motherfucking son of a shit-eating bitch.” He tried the transmitter one more time before throwing it to the ground in disgust He turned to the blackshirt beside him. “Get me the backup unit.
Schnell”

“Jawohl, Herr Standartenführer!”
The other SS officer dashed away, to return in short order with a pack and transmitter identical to the ones that had failed.

Skorzeny flipped the activating switch and pressed the red button on the new transmitter. Again the bomb in Lodz failed to explode. “Shit,” Skorzeny said wearily, as if even creative obscenity were more trouble than it was worth. He started to smash the second transmitter, but checked himself. Shaking his head, he said, “Something’s fucked up somewhere. Go and broadcast
EGGPLANT
on the general-distribution frequencies.”

“E
GGPLANT
?” The other SS man looked like a dog watching a juicy bone being taken away. “Must we?”

“Bet your arse we must, Maxi,” Skorzeny answered. “If the bomb doesn’t go off, we don’t move. The bomb hasn’t gone off. Now we have to send out the signal to let the troops know the attack’s on hold. We’ll send
KNIFE
as soon as it goes up. Now move, damn you! If some overeager idiot opens up because he didn’t get the
halt
signal, Himmler’ll wear your guts for garters.”

Jäger had never imagined an SS officer named Maxi. He’d never imagined anybody, no matter what his name was, could move so fast. “What now?” he asked Skorzeny.

He’d seldom seen the big, bluff Austrian indecisive, but that was the only word that fit “Damned if I know,” Skorzeny answered. “Maybe some sexton or whatever the kikes call them spotted the aerial hooked up to the grave marker and tore it loose. If that’s all it is, a simple reconnection would get things going again without much trouble. If it’s anything more than that, if the Jews have their hands on the bomb . . .” He shook his head. “That could be downright ugly. For some reason or other, they don’t exactly love us.” Even his laugh, usually a great fierce chortle, rang hollow now.

For some reason or other.
That was as close as Skorzeny would come to acknowledging what the
Reich
had done to the Jews. It was closer than a lot of German officers came, but it was not close enough, not as far as Jäger was concerned. He said, “What are you going to do about it?”

Skorzeny looked at him as if he were the idiot. “What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to shag ass down to Lodz and make that fucker work, one way or the other. Like I say, I hope the problem’s just with the aerial. But if it’s not, if the Jews really did get wind of this some kind of way, I’ll manage just fine, thank you very much.”

“You can’t be thinking of going by yourself,” Jäger exclaimed. “If the Jews do have it”—he didn’t know himself, not for sure—“they’ll turn you into a
blutwurst
quick as boiled asparagus.” The classics sometimes came in handy in the oddest ways.

Skorzeny shook his head again. “You’re wrong, Jäger. It’ll be a—what do the RAF bastards call it?—a piece of cake, that’s what. There’s a cease-fire on, remember? Even if the kikes have stolen the bomb, they won’t be guarding it real hard. Why should they? They won’t know we know they’ve got it, because they can’t figure we’d try and set it off in the middle of a truce.” His leer had most of its old force back. “Of course not. We’re good little boys and girls, right? Except for one thing: I’m not a good little boy.”

“Mm, I’d noticed that,” Jäger said dryly. Now Skorzeny’s laugh was full of his wicked vinegar—he recovered fast. He was also damned good at thinking on his feet; every word he said sounded reasonable. “When are you leaving?”

“Soon as I change clothes, get some rations, and take care of a couple of things here,” the SS man answered. “If the bomb goes up, it’ll give those scaly sons of bitches a kick in the teeth they’ll remember for a long time.” In absurdly coquettish fashion, he fluttered his fingers at Jäger and tramped away.

From the cupola of the Panther, Jäger stared after him. With his unit on full battle alert, how the devil was he supposed to get away and get word to Mieczyslaw so he could pass it on to Anielewicz by whatever roundabout route he used? The answer was simple, and stared Jäger in the face: he couldn’t. But if he didn’t, he worried not just about thousands of Jews going up in a toadstool-shaped cloud of dust, but also about Germany. What
would
the Lizards visit on the
Vaterland
for touching off an atomic bomb during a truce? Jäger didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out, either.

From down in the turret of the Panther, Gunther Grillparzer said, “No show today after all, Colonel?”

“Doesn’t look that way,” Jäger answered, and then took a chance by adding, “Can’t say I’m sorry, either.”

To his surprise, Grillparzer said, “Amen!” The gunner seemed to think some kind of explanation was needed there, for he went on, “I hold no brief for kikes, mind you, sir, but it ain’t like they’re our number-one worry right now, you know what I mean? It’s the Lizards I really want to boot in the arse, not them. They’re all going to hell anyway, so I don’t hardly have to worry about ’em.”

“Corporal, as far as I’m concerned, they can sew red stripes on your trousers and put you on the General Staff,” Jäger told him. “I think you’ve got better strategic sense than most of our top planners, and that’s a fact.”

“If I do, then God help Germany,” Grillparzer said, and laughed.

“God help Germany,” Jäger agreed, and didn’t.

The rest of the day passed in lethargic anticlimax. Jäger and his crew climbed out of their Panther with nothing but relief: you rolled the dice every time you went up against the Lizards, and sooner or later snake eyes stared back at you. Sometime during the afternoon, Otto Skorzeny disappeared. Jäger pictured him slouching toward Lodz, a pack on his back, and very likely makeup over the famous scar. Could he hide that devilish gleam in his eye with makeup, too? Jäger had his doubts.