Striking the Balance (77 page)

“If you were Skorzeny, what would you do?” he asked Heinrich Jäger. Jäger was, after all, not only a German but a man who’d worked closely with the commando extraordinaire. Asking a German felt odd, anyhow. Intellectually, he knew Jäger was no Jew-butcher. Emotionally . . . 

The panzer colonel scratched his head, “If I were in charge instead of Skorzeny, I’d lie low till I knew enough to strike, then hit quick and hard.” He chuckled wryly. “But whether that’s what he’ll do, I couldn’t begin to tell you. He has his own way of getting things done. Sometimes I think he’s daft—till he brings it off.”

“Nobody’s set eyes on him since I did,” Anielewicz said, frowning. “He might have fallen off the face of the earth—though that’d be too much to ask for, wouldn’t it? Maybe be is lying low.”

“He can’t do that for too long, though,” Jäger pointed out. “If he finds out where the bomb is, he’ll try to set it off. It’s late already, of course, and a major attack hinges on it. He won’t wait.”

“We’ve taken out the detonator,” Mordechai said. “It’s not in the bomb any more, though we can get it to the bomb in a hurry if we have to.”

Jäger shrugged. “That shouldn’t matter. If Skorzeny didn’t bring another one, he’s a fool—and a fool he’s not. Besides which, he’s an engineer; he’d know how to install it.” An engineering student himself, Anielewicz grimaced. He wanted nothing in common with the SS man.

Ludmila Gorbunova asked, “Will he have men he can recruit here in Lodz, or is he all alone in this city?”

Anielewicz looked to Jäger. Jäger shrugged again. “This town was under the rule of the
Reich
for some time before the Lizards came. Are there still Germans here?”

“From the days when it was Litzmannstadt, you mean?” Mordechai asked, and shook his head without waiting for an answer. “No, after the Lizards came, we made most of the Aryan colonists pack up and go. The Poles did the same thing with them. And do you know what? We don’t miss the Germans a bit, either.”

Jäger looked at him steadily. Anielewicz felt himself flushing. If any man alive was entitled to score points off a German soldier, he was.
A
German soldier, yes, but not
this
German soldier. If it hadn’t been for
this
German soldier, he wouldn’t be here
to
score points. He had to remember that, no matter how hard it was.

“Not many Germans, eh?” Jäger said matter-of-factly. “If any are left, Skorzeny will find them. And he’ll probably have connections among the Poles. They don’t like you Jews, either.”

Was he trying to score points, too? Mordechai couldn’t be sure. Even if he was, that didn’t make him wrong. Ludmila said, “But the Poles. If they help Skorzeny, they’ll be blowing themselves up, too.”

“You know that,” Jäger said. “I know that. But the Poles don’t necessarily know it. If Skorzeny says, ‘Here, I have a big bomb hidden that will blow up all the Jews but not you,’ they’re liable to believe him.”

“He’s a good liar?” Anielewicz asked, trying to get more of a feel for his opponent than he could from the unending propaganda the
Reich
pumped out about Skorzeny.

But Jäger might have been part of Göbbels’ propaganda mill. “He’s good at everything that has to do with being a raider,” he answered with no trace of irony, then proceeded to give an example: “He went into Besançon, for instance, with a sack of ginger to bribe the Lizards, and he came out driving one of their panzers.”

“I do not believe this,” Ludmila said, before Anielewicz could. “I heard it reported on German shortwave wireless, but I do not believe it.”

“It’s true whether you believe it or not,” Jäger said. “I was there. I saw his head sticking up out of the driver’s hatch. I didn’t believe he could do it, either, I thought he was going in there to commit suicide, nothing more. I was wrong. I have never underestimated him since.”

Anielewicz took that evaluation, which he found almost too depressing to contemplate, to Solomon Gruver and Bertha Fleishman. Gruver’s mouth turned down at the corners, making him look even gloomier than he usually did. “He can’t be that good,” the former sergeant said. “If he were that good, he’d be God, and he isn’t. He’s just a man.”

“We have to put our ears to the ground among the Poles,” Bertha said. “If anything is going on with them, we need to hear about it fast as we can.”

Mordechai sent her a grateful look. She took this whole business as seriously as he did. Given the levelheadedness she usually displayed, that was a sign it needed to be taken seriously.

“So we listen. So what?” Gruver said. “If he’s that good, we won’t hear anything. We won’t spot him unless he wants to be spotted, and we won’t know what he’s up to till he decides to hit us.”

“All of which is true, and none of which means we can stop trying,” Anielewicz said. He slammed his open hand into the side of the fire engine. That hurt his hand more than the engine. “If only I’d been certain I recognized him! If only I’d come out of—where I came out of—a few seconds earlier, so I could have seen his face. If, If, if—” It ate at him.

“Even thinking he was in Lodz put us on alert,” Bertha said. “Who knows what he might have done if he’d got here without our knowing it?”

“He turned a corner,” Anielewicz said, running it through his mind again like a piece of film from the cinema. “He turned a corner, and then another one, very quickly. The second time, I had to guess which way he’d gone, and I guessed wrong.”

“Don’t keep beating yourself over the head with it, Mordechai,” Bertha said. “It can’t be helped now, and you did everything you could.”

“That’s so,” Gruver rumbled. “No doubt about it”

Anielewicz hardly heard him. He was looking at Bertha Fleishman. She’d never called him by his first name before, not that he remembered. He would have remembered, too; he was certain of that.

She was looking at him, too. She flushed a little when their eyes met, but she didn’t look away. He’d known she liked him well enough. He liked her well enough, too. Except when she smiled, she was plain and mousy. He’d been to bed with women far prettier. He suddenly seemed to hear Solomon Gruver’s deep voice again, going,
So what?
Gruver-that-wasn’t had a point. He’d bedded those women and enjoyed himself doing it, but he hadn’t for an instant thought of spending his life with any of them. Bertha, though . . . 

“If we live through this—” he said. The five words made a complete sentence. If you knew how to listen to them.

Bertha Fleishman did. “Yes. If we do,” she replied: a complete answer.

The real Solomon Gruver seemed less attentive to what was going on around him than the imaginary one inside Anielewicz’s head. “If we live through this,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something better with that thing we have than leaving it where it is. But if we move it now, we just draw attention to it, and that lets this Skorzeny
mamzer
have his chance.”

“That’s all true, Solomon—every word of it,” Mordechai agreed solemnly. Then he started to laugh. A moment later, so did Bertha.

“And what is so funny?” Gruver demanded with ponderous dignity. “Did I make a joke and, God forbid, not know it?”

“God forbid,” Anielewicz said, and laughed harder.

As George Bagnall and Ken Embry walked to Dover College, jet engines roared overhead. Bagnall’s automatic reaction was to find the nearest hole in the ground and jump into it. With an effort, he checked himself and looked upward. For once, the thinking, rational part of his brain had got it right: those were Meteors up there, not Lizard fighter-bombers.

“Bloody hell!” Embry burst out; conditioned reflex must nearly have got the better of him, too. “We’ve only been gone a year and a half, but it feels as though we’ve stepped back into 1994, not 1944.”

“Doesn’t it just,” Bagnall agreed. “They were flying those things when we left, but not many of them. You don’t see Hurricanes at all any more, and they’re phasing out Spitfires fast as they can. It’s a brave new world, and no mistake.”

“Still a place for bomber crew—for the next twenty minutes, anyhow,” Embry said. “They haven’t put jets on Lancs, not yet they haven’t. But everything else they have done—” He shook his head. “No wonder they sent us back to school. We’re almost as obsolete as if we’d been flying Sopwith Camels. Trouble is, of course, we haven’t been flying
anything.”

“It’s even worse for Jones,” Bagnall said. “We’re still flying the same buses, even if they have changed the rest of the rules. His radars are starting to come from a different world: literally.”

“Same with our bomb-aiming techniques,” Embry said as they climbed the poured-concrete steps and strode down the corridor toward their classroom.

The lecturer there, a flight lieutenant named Constantine Jordan, was already scribbling on the blackboard, though it still lacked a couple of minutes of the hour. Bagnall looked around as he took his seat. Most of his classmates had a pale, pasty look to them; some were in obvious if stifled pain. That made sense—besides the rarities like Bagnall and Embry, the people who’d been out of service long enough to require refresher courses were the ones who’d been badly wounded. A couple had dreadful scars on their faces; what lay under their uniforms was anyone’s guess, though not one Bagnall cared to make.

An instant before the clock in the bell tower chimed eleven, Flight Lieutenant Jordan turned and began: “As I noted at the end of yesterday’s session, what the Lizards call
skelkwank
bids fair to revolutionize bomb aiming.
Skelkwank
light, unlike the ordinary sort”—he pointed up to the electric lamps—“is completely organized, you might say. It’s all of the same frequency, the same amplitude, the same phase. The Lizards have several ways of creating such light. We’re busy working on them to see which ones we can most readily make for ourselves. But that’s largely beside the point. We’ve captured enough generators of
skelkwank
light to have equipped a good many bombers with them, and that’s why you’re here.”

Bagnall’s pencil scurried across the notebook. Every so often, he’d pause to shake his hand back and forth to wring out writer’s cramp. All this was new to him, and all vital—now he was able to understand the term he’d first met in Pskov. Amazing, all the things you could do with
skelkwank
light.

Jordan went on, “What we do is, we illuminate the target with a
skelkwank
lamp. A sensor head properly attuned to it manipulates the fins on the bomb and guides it to the target. So long as the light stays on the target, the guidance will work. We’ve all seen it used against us more often than we’d fancy. Again, we’re operating with captured sensor heads, which are in limited supply, but we’re also exploring ways and means to manufacture them. Yes, Mr. McBride? You have a question?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the flying officer who’d raised his hand. “These new munitions are all very well, sir, but if we’re flying against the Lizards, how do we approach the target closely enough to have some hope of destroying it? Their weapons can strike us at much greater range than that at which we can respond. Believe me, sir, I know that.” He was one of the men who had scar tissue slagging half his face.

“It is a difficulty,” Jordan admitted. “We are also seeking to copy the guided rockets with which the Lizards have shot down so many of our aircraft, but that’s proving slower work, even with the assistance of Lizard prisoners.”

“We’d best not fight another war with them any time soon, is all I can say,” McBride answered, “or we’ll come out of it with no pilots left at all. Without rockets to match theirs, we’re hors d’oeuvres, nothing better.”

Bagnall had never thought of himself as a canapé, but the description fit all too well. He wished he could have gone up against the
Luftwaffe
with a Lancaster armed with
skelkwank
bombs and rockets to swat down the
Messerschmitts
before they bored in for the kill. After a moment, he realized he might fly with those weapons against the Germans one day. But if he did, the Germans were liable to have them, too.

Flight Lieutenant Jordan kept lecturing for several minutes after the noon bells rang. Again, that was habit. At last, he dismissed his pupils with the warning, “Tomorrow you’ll be quizzed on what we’ve covered this past week. Those with poor marks will be turned into toads and sent hopping after blackbeetles. Amazing what technology can do these days, is it not? See you after lunch.”

When Bagnall and Embry went out into the corridor to head to the cafeteria for an uninspiring but free meal, Jerome Jones called to them, “Care to dine with my chum here?”

His chum was a Lizard who introduced himself in hissing English as Mzepps. When Bagnall found out he’d been a radar technician before his capture, he willingly let him join the group. Talking civilly with a Lizard felt odd, even odder than his first tense meeting with that German lieutenant-colonel in Paris, barely days after the RAF had stopped going after the Nazis.

Despite Mzepps’ appearance, though, the Lizard soon struck him as a typical noncommissioned officer: worried about his job, but not much about how it fit into the bigger picture. “You Big Uglies, you all the time go why, why, why,” he complained. “Who cares why? Just do. Why not important. Is word? Yes, important.”

“It never has occurred to him,” Jones remarked, “that if we didn’t go why, why, why all the time, we should have been in no position to fight back when he and his scaly cohorts got here.”

Bagnall chewed on that as he and Ken Embry headed back toward Flight Lieutenant Jordan’s class. He thought about the theory Jordan was teaching along with the practical applications of what the RAF was learning from the Lizards. By everything Mzepps had said, the Lizards seldom operated that way themselves.
What
mattered more to them than
why.

“I wonder why that is,” he murmured.

“Why what is?” Embry asked, which made Bagnall realize he’d spoken aloud.

“Nothing, really,” he answered. “Just being—human.”

“Is that a fact?” Embry said. “You couldn’t prove it by me.”

The RAF men in the lecture hall stared at them as they walked through the doors. As far as Bagnall knew, no one had ever done that laughing before.