In the Balance (54 page)

“They did their jobs,” Max snapped. But after he spat into a clump of brown leaves, he added, “Yeah, all right, I’ll remember them in the
kaddish.”

“I don’t know that word,” Jager said.

“Prayer for the dead,” Max said shortly. He glanced toward Jäger again. Now his gaze was measuring instead of hostile, but somehow no easier to bear. “You don’t know fucking much, do you? You don’t know Babi Yar for instance, eh?”

“No,” Jäger admitted. “What’s that?”

“Place a little outside of Kiev, not far from here, as a matter of fact. You find a big hole in the ground, then line Jews up at the edge of it. Men, women, children—doesn’t matter. You line ’em up, you shoot ’em in the back of the neck. They fall right into their own graves. You Germans are
fucking efficient, you know? Then you line up another row and shoot them, too. You keep doing it till your big hole is full. Then you find yourself another fucking hole.”

“Propaganda—” Jäger said.

Without a word, Max used his free hand to pull down the collar of his peasant’s blouse and bare his neck. Jäger knew a gunshot scar when he saw one. The Jew said, “I must have jerked just as the gun went off behind me. I fell down. They had bastards down in the hole with more guns, making sure everybody really was dead. They must have missed me. I hope they don’t get a fucking reprimand, you know? More people fell on me, but not too many—it was getting late. When it was dark, I managed to crawl out and get away. I’ve been killing fucking Germans ever since.”

Jäger didn’t answer. He hadn’t gone out of his way to notice what happened to Jews in Russian territory taken by the Germans. Nobody in the
Wehrmacht
went out of his way to notice that. It wasn’t safe for your career; it might not be safe for you personally. He’d heard things. Everybody heard things. He hadn’t worried much about it. After all, the
Führer
had declared Jews the enemies of the
Reich
.

But there were ways soldiers treated enemies. Lining them up at the edge of a pit and shooting them from behind wasn’t supposed to be one of those ways. Jäger tried to imagine himself doing that. It wasn’t easy. But if the
Reich
was at war and his superior gave him the order … He shook his head. He just didn’t know.

From across the chest, less than a meter away, his Jewish yokemate watched him flounder. Watching Max watch him only made Jäger flounder harder. If Jews could flip-flop from enemies of the
Reich
to comrades-in-arms, that just made massacring them all the harder to stomach.

Max’s voice was sly. “You maybe have a fucking conscience?”

“Of course I have a conscience,” Jäger said indignantly. Then he shut up again. If he had a conscience, as he’d automatically claimed, how was he supposed to ignore what Germany might well have been doing? (Even in his own mind, he didn’t want to phrase it any more definitely than that.)

To his relief, the woods started thinning out ahead. That meant the most dangerous part of the mission—crossing open country with what they’d stolen from the Lizards—lay ahead. Beside the abyss whose edge he’d been treading with Max, physical danger suddenly seemed a welcome diversion. As long as he was putting his own life on the line, he’d be too busy to look down into the abyss and see the people piled there with neat holes in the backs of their necks.

The survivors of the raiding party gathered near the edge of the trees. Skorzeny took charge of them. From under the thick layer of dead leaves, he pulled out several chests which looked the same as the one Jäger and
Max carried but were not lead-lined. “Two men to each one,” he ordered, pausing to let the Russian partisans who understood German translate for those who didn’t. “We scatter now, two by two, to make it as hard as we can for the Lizards to figure out who has the real one.”

One of the partisans said, “How do we know the real one will go where it’s supposed to?”

All the worn, dirty men, Russians and Germans alike, nodded at that. They still had no great trust in one another; they’d fought too hard for that. Skorzeny said, “We have one from each side holding the prize. The
panje
wagon that’s waiting for them has one from each side, too. If they don’t try to murder each other, we’ll be all right,
ja?”

The SS man laughed to show he’d made a joke. Jäger looked over to Max. The Jew was not laughing. He wore the expression Jäger had often seen on junior officers who faced a tough tactical problem: he was weighing his options. That meant Jäger had to weigh his, too.

Skorzeny said, “We’ll go out one pair at a time. The team with the real chest will go third.”

“Who told you you were God?” a partisan asked.

The SS man’s scarred cheek crinkled as he gave an impudent grin. “Who told you I wasn’t?” He waited a moment to see if he got any more argument. When he didn’t, he swatted a man from the pair closest to him on the shoulder and shouted “Go! Go! Go!” as if they were paratroopers diving out of a Ju-52 transport plane.

The second pair followed a moment later. Then Skorzeny yelled “Go! Go! Go!” again and Jäger and Max burst out of the woods and started off toward the promised
panje
wagon. It waited several kilometers north and west, outside the Lizards’ tightest security zone. Jäger wanted to sprint the whole way. Slogging through mud carrying a heavy chest, that wasn’t practical.

“I’m fucking sick of rain,” Max said, though he knew as well as Jäger that the snow which would follow was even harder to endure.

Jäger said, “Right now I don’t mind rain at all. The Lizards will have a harder time chasing us through it than they would on dry ground. The low clouds will make us harder to spot through the air, too. If you want to get right down to it, I wouldn’t mind fog, either.”

“I would,” Max said. “We’d get lost.”

“I have a compass.”

“Very efficient,” Max said dryly. Jäger took it for a compliment until he remembered it was the word the Jew had used to describe the assembly-line murder at—what was the name of the place?—at Babi Yar, that was it.

Anger surged in the panzer major. The trouble was, he had trouble deciding whether to turn it on his own people for dishonoring the uniforms
they wore or the Jew for telling him about it and making him notice it. He glanced over at Max. As usual, Max was watching him.
He
had no trouble finding a focus for his fury.

Jäger twisted his head, looked behind him. The driving rain had already obscured the woods. He could see one of the decoy pairs, but only one. He wouldn’t have wanted to track anyone in weather like this, and wished just as much trouble on the Lizards. They wouldn’t pursue in panzers, anyhow; from what he’d seen, their armor had at least as much trouble coping with Russian mud as the
Wehrmacht
did.

He must have been thinking aloud. Max grinned an unsympathetic grin and said, “You poor bogged-down bastards.”

“Fuck you, too, Max.” In the wrong tone of voice, that would have started the fight Skorzeny had not-quite-joked about. As it was, the Jewish partisan’s expression changed shape as if he, like Jäger, had to change some of his thinking.

Then both men’s faces congealed to fear. The Lizards had more helicopters in the air, and this time no
flak
cannon would stop them. Rifle shots rang out from back in the woods, but using a rifle against one of these machines was as magnificently futile as the Polish lancers’ charges against German panzers back when the war—the human war—was new.

But these rifle bullets did have some effect. The whistling roar of the copter rotors grew no louder. The deadly machines hovered over the trees. Their guns snarled. When they paused, more rifle fire announced that they hadn’t finished off all the raiders. The yammering resumed.

The sound from the helicopters changed. Jäger looked back, but could see nothing through the curtains of rain. He tried to be optimistic anyhow: “Maybe they’re settling down so they can comb through the woods—if they are, they’ll be looking in the wrong place.”

Max was less sanguine: “Don’t count on them to be so fucking stupid.”

“They aren’t what you’d call good soldiers, not in the tactical sense,” Jäger answered seriously. “They’re brave enough, and of course they have all that wonderful equipment, but ask them to do anything they haven’t planned out in advance and they start floundering around.”
They’re even worse than Russians that way
, he thought, but he kept quiet about that.

The strafing from the helicopters hadn’t slaughtered all the raiders. Rifles barked again; a Soviet submachine gun added its note to the din. Then, harsher and flatter, Lizard automatic small arms answered.

“They
have
landed troops!” Jäger exclaimed. “The longer they waste time back there, the better the chance the mission has of succeeding.”

“And the likelier they’ll kill off my friends,” Max said. “Yours too, I suppose. Does a fucking Nazi have friends? After a tough day shooting Jews in the back of the neck, do you go out and drink some beer with your
Kameraden?”

“I’m a soldier, not a butcher,” Jäger said. He wondered whether Georg Schultz had got one of the dummy chests. If so, he was tramping through the mud, too. If not … He also wondered about Otto Skorzeny. The SS captain seemed to have a gift for creating impossible situations and then escaping from them. He’d need all that gift now. But thinking of the SS made Jäger think of Babi Yar. That would have been their doing;
Wehrmacht
men couldn’t have stomached it. He added, “You Russians have butchers, too.”

“So?” Max said. “Does that make you right?” Jäger found no good answer. The Jewish partisan went on, “I wish they’d sent me to the
gulag
in Siberia years before you fucking Germans ever got to Kiev. Then I wouldn’t have had to see what I saw.”

Further argument cut off abruptly when Jäger fell headlong into the muck. Max helped him haul himself to his feet. They pushed on. Jäger felt as if he were a hundred years old. A kilometer through this clinging goo was worse than a day’s march on hard, dry ground. He wistfully wondered whether the Soviet Union contained so much as a square centimeter of hard, dry ground at the moment.

He also wondered for what the soft, wet ground over which he was fleeing had been used. In Germany, land had a clearly defined purpose: meadow, crops, forest, park, town. This stretch met no such criteria. It was just land—raw terrain. Of that the Soviet Union had unending inefficient abundance.

Jäger abruptly cut off his disparaging thoughts about Soviet inefficiency. His head went up like a hunted animal’s. The tiny, atrophied muscles in his ears tried to make them prick like a cat’s. Lizard helicopters were in the air again. “We have to move faster,” he said to Max.

The partisan pointed to his own trousers, which were covered in mud up to the knees. He dismissed Jäger’s suggestion with three sardonic words: “Good fucking luck.”

Rationally, Jäger knew Max was right. Still, as the whirring drone from the sky grew louder, he wanted to drop the heavy chest and run. He looked over his shoulder. The driving rain veiled the helicopter from sight. He could only hope it helped hide him from the Lizards.

Off to the south, from the middle of this big open field, shots cracked; Jäger recognized the deep bark of a Gewehr-98K, the standard German infantry rifle (no way to tell now, of course, whether it was borne by a standard German infantryman or a very definitely nonstandard Russian partisan). The helicopter that had been closest to him droned off to meet the fleabite challenge.

“I think some of the decoys just drew them away from us,” Jäger said.

“It might be a Jew saving your neck, Nazi. How does that make you feel?” Max said. After a moment, though, he added in wondering tones, “Or it might be a fucking Nazi saving mine. How does that make
me
feel? You know the word
verkakte
, Nazi? This is a
verkakte
mess, and no mistake.”

A village—maybe even a small town—loomed out of the rain ahead. In instant unspoken agreement, both men swerved wide around it. “What’s the name of that place?” Jäger asked.

“Chernobyl, I think,” Max said. “The Lizards drove the people out after their ship blew up, but they might keep a little garrison there.”

“Let’s hope they don’t,” Jäger said. The Jewish partisan nodded.

If the village held a garrison, it didn’t come forth to search for the raiders … or maybe it did, and simply missed Jäger and Max in the downpour. Once past the clump of ugly wooden buildings and even uglier concrete ones, Jäger glanced down at his compass to get back onto the proper course.

Max watched him put it back in his pocket. “How are we going to find the fucking
panje
wagon?”

“We keep on this heading until—”

“—we walk past them in the rain,” the Jew put in.

“If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” Jäger said icily.

“I don’t. I was hoping you did.”

They pushed on, skirting another small patch of woods and then returning to the course the compass dictated. Jäger had a piece of black bread and some sausage in his pack. Getting them out one-handed was awkward, but he managed. He broke the bread, bit the sausage in half; and passed Max his share. The Jew hesitated but ate. After a while, he pulled a little tin flask from his hip pocket. He yanked out the cork, gave the flask to Jäger for the first swig. Vodka ran down his throat like fire.

“Thanks,” he said. “That’s good.” He put his thumb over the opening so the rain couldn’t get in, passed the flask back to Max.

Off to one side, somebody spoke up in Russian. Jäger started, then dropped the chest that had become like an unwelcome part of him and grabbed for the rifle slung on his back. Then a German voice added,
“Ja
, we could use something good about now.”

“You found them,” Max said to Jäger as the
panje
wagon came up through the muck. “That’s fucking amazing.” Instead of hatred, he looked at Jäger with something like respect. Jäger, who was at least as surprised as the Jewish partisan, did his best not to show it.

The horse that pulled the
panje
wagon had seen better days. The light wooden wagon itself rode on large wheels; it was low, wide, and flat-bottomed, so it could float almost boatlike across the surface of even the deepest
mud. It looked as if its design hadn’t changed for centuries, which was probably true; no vehicle was better adapted to coping with Russia’s twice-yearly
rasputitsa
.