In the Balance (80 page)

“Would be necessary,” Molotov amended as he came back to the
Kukuruznik
. His face remained expressionless, but his voice betrayed more animation; Ludmila wondered how hard he’d been fighting to hold it in. Her own bladder was pretty full, too. Perhaps confirming her thought, the foreign commissar continued, “Tea would also be welcome now.” Not before, ran through Ludmila’s mind—he would have exploded. She knew that feeling.

The major said, “Comrades, if you will come with me … He led Ludmila and Molotov toward his own dwelling. As they kicked their way through the snow, he bawled orders to his groundcrew. The men ran like wraiths in the predawn darkness, easier to follow by ear than by eye.

The major’s quarters were half-hut, half dug-out cave. A lantern on a board-and-trestle table cast a flickering light over the little chamber. A samovar stood nearby; so did a spirit stove. Atop the latter was a pot from which rose a heavenly odor.

With every sign of pride, the major ladled out bowls of borscht, thick with cabbage, beets, and meat that might have been veal or just as easily might have been rat. Ludmila didn’t care; whatever it was, it was hot and filling. Molotov ate as if he were stoking a machine.

The
major
handed them glasses of tea. It was also hot, but had an odd taste—a couple of odd tastes, in fact. “Cut with dried herbs and barks, I’m afraid,” the major said apologetically, “and sweetened with honey we found ourselves. Haven’t seen any sugar for quite a while.”

“Given the circumstances, it is adequate,” Molotov said: not high praise, but understanding, at any rate.

“Comrade Pilot, you may rest there,” the major said, pointing to a pile of blankets in one corner that evidently served him for a bed. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, for you the men are preparing a cot, which should be here momentarily.”

“Not necessary,” Molotov said. “A blanket or two will also do for me.”

“What?” The major blinked. “Well, as you say, of course. Excuse me, comrades.” He went back out into the cold, returned in a little while with
more blankets. “Here you are, Comrade Foreign Commissar.”

“Thank you. Be sure to awaken us at the scheduled time,” Molotov said.

“Oh, yes,” the major promised.

Yawning, Ludmila buried herself in the blankets. They smelled powerfully of their usual user. That didn’t bother her, if anything, it was reassuring. She wondered how Molotov, who was used to sleeping softer than with blankets on dirt, would manage here. She fell asleep herself before she found out.

Some indefinite while later, she woke with a start. Was that horrible noise some new Lizard weapon? She stared wildly around the Air Force major’s quarters, then started to laugh. Who would have imagined that illustrious Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, foreign commissar of the USSR and second in the Soviet Union only to the Great Stalin, snored like a buzzsaw? Ludmila pulled the blankets up over her head, which cut the din enough to let her get back to sleep herself.

After more borscht and vile, honey-sweetened tea, the flight resumed. The U-2 droned slowly through the night—an express train could have matched its speed—north and west. Snow-dappled evergreen forests slid by below. Ludmila hugged the ground as tightly as she dared.

Then, without warning, the trees disappeared, to be replaced by a long stretch of unbroken whiteness. “Lake Ladoga,” Ludmila said aloud, pleased at the navigational check the lake gave her. She flew along the southern shore toward Leningrad.

Well before she got to the city, she skimmed low over the lunar landscape of the German and Soviet lines around it. The Lizards had pounded both impartially. Before they came, though, the heroism and dreadful privations of the defenders of Leningrad, home and heart of the October Revolution, had rung through the Soviet Union. How many thousands, how many hundreds of thousands, starved to death inside the German ring? No one would ever know.

And now she was flying Molotov to confer with the Germans who had subjected Leningrad to such a cruel siege. Intellectually, Ludmila understood the need for that. Emotionally, it remained hard to stomach.

Yet the
Kukuruznik
she flew had been efficiently maintained by a German, and, from what Georg Schultz had said, he and Major Jäger had fought alongside Russians to do something important: either he didn’t understand exactly what or he was keeping his mouth shut about that or both. So it could be done. It would have to be done, in fact. But Ludmila did not like it.

As the shore of Lake Ladoga had before, now the Gulf of Finland gave her something to steer by. She began to peer ahead, looking for landing lights: the next field was supposed to be not far from Vyborg.

When Ludmila finally spotted the lights, she bounced the biplane in a
good deal more roughly than she had at the last airstrip. The officer who greeted her spoke Russian with an odd accent. That was not unusual in the polyglot Soviet Union, but then she noticed that several of his men wore coalscuttle helmets. “Are you Germans?” she asked, first in Russian and then
auf Deutsch
.

“Nein,”
he answered, though his German sounded better than hers. “We are Finns. Welcome to Viipuri.” His smile was not altogether pleasant; the town had passed from Finnish to Soviet hands in the Winter War of 1939-40, but the Finns took it back when they joined the Nazis against the USSR in 1941.

“Can one of your mechanics handle this type of aircraft?” she asked.

With an ironic glint in his eye, he scanned the
Kukuruznik
from one end to the other. “Meaning no disrespect, but I think any twelve-year-old who is handy with tools could work on one of these,” he answered. Since he was probably right, Ludmila kept her annoyance to herself.

The Finnish base had better food than Ludmila had tasted in some time. It also seemed cleaner than the ones from which she’d been fighting. She wondered whether that was because the Finns hadn’t seen as much action against the Lizards as the Soviets had.

“Partly,” the officer who’d greeted her said when she asked. His greatcoat, she noticed once they were inside, was gray, not khaki; it had three narrow bars on the cuffs. She wondered what rank that made him. “And partly, again meaning no disrespect, you may see that other people are often just generally neater about things than you Russians. But never mind that. Would you care to use our
sauna?”
When he saw she didn’t understand the Finnish word, he turned it into German: “Steam-bath.”

“Oh, yes!” she exclaimed. Not only was it a chance to get clean, it was a chance to get
warm
. The Finns didn’t even leer at her when she went in alone, as Russians would have done. She wondered how manly they were.

Flying over Finland and then over Sweden, she thought about what the Finnish officer had said. Just looking down at countryside that war had not ravaged was new and different; flying past towns that weren’t burned-out ruins took her thoughts back to better days she’d almost forgotten in the midst of combat’s urgency.

Even under snow, though, she could see the orderly patterns of fields and fences. Everything was on a smaller scale than in the Soviet Union, and almost toylike in its tiny perfection. She wondered if the Scandinavians were neater than Russians simply because they had so much less land and had to use it more efficiently.

That impression grew stronger in Denmark, where even forest had all but vanished and every square centimeter seemed put to some useful purpose. And then, past Denmark, she flew into Germany.

Germany, she saw at once, had been at war. Though her flight path took
her a couple of hundred kilometers west of murdered Berlin, she saw devastation that matched anything she’d come across in the Soviet Union. In fact, first the British and then the Lizards had given Gennany a more concentrated beating from the air than the Soviet Union as a whole had received. Town after town had factories, train stations, and residential blocks pounded to ruins.

For that matter, the Lizards were still pounding Germany. When Ludmila heard the roar of their jets, she flew doubly low and slow, as if her U-2 were a tiny gnat buzzing by the floor, too small to be worth noticing.

The Germans were still fighting back, too. Tracers spiderwebbed across the night sky like fireworks. Searchlights stabbed, trying to pin Lizard raiders with their beams. Once or twice, off in the distance, Ludmila heard piston engines racing.
So
, she thought,
the
Luftwaffe
still has fighters in the air too
.

As she flew farther south, the land began to rise. Her landing strip the fourth night of her flight, outside a little town called Suilzbach, was in what looked to have been a potato field. A ground crew dragged her plane to cover while a
Luftwaffe
officer drove her and Molotov to town in a horsedrawn wagon. “The Lizards are too likely to shoot at automobiles,” he explained apologetically.

She nodded. “It is so with us, too.”

“Ah,” said the
Luftwaffe
man.

Every so often,
Pravda
or
Izvestia
would describe the atmosphere in diplomatic talks as “correct.” Ludmila hadn’t quite understood what that meant. Now, seeing the way the Germans treated her and Molotov, she did. They were polite, they were attentive, but they couldn’t hide that they wished they didn’t have to deal with the Soviets at all. It was mutual, Ludmila thought, at least as far as she was concerned. As for Molotov, he was seldom more. than civil to anyone, Russian or German.

Ludmila had to work hard to suppress a yelp of glee at the prospect of sleeping in a real bed for the first time in she couldn’t remember how long. Suppress it she did, lest the Nazis take her for uncultured. She also studiously ignored the
Luftwaffe
officer’s hints that he wouldn’t mind sleeping in that same bed with her.

To her relief, he didn’t get obnoxious about it. He did say, “You will, I hope, forgive me; but I would not recommend trying to fly to Berchtesgaden by night,
Fräulein
Gorbunova.”

“My rank is senior lieutenant,” Ludmiila answered. “Why would you not recommend this?”

“Flying at night is difficult enough—”

“I have flown a good many night attack missions, both against the Lizards and against you Germans,” she said: let him make of that what he
would.

His eyes widened, but only momentarily. Then he said, “Maybe so, but those, I dare say, were out on the Russian steppe, not in the mountains.” He waited for her response; she nodded, yielding the point. He went on, “The danger is worse in the mountains, not only because of the terrain but also from gusts of wind. Your margin of error would be unacceptably low for a mission of this importance, especially since you will want to stay as low to the ground as you can.”

“What do you suggest, then? A flight by day? The Lizards are too likely to shoot me down.”

The German said, “I admit this. To protect you as you fly by day, though, we will sortie several squadrons of fighters—not to escort you, for that would attract unwanted attention to your aircraft, but to distract the Lizards from the area through which you will be passing.”

Ludmila considered that. Given the inequality between German planes and what the Lizards flew, some pilots would almost certainly be sacrificing their lives to make sure she and Molotov got through to this Berchtesgaden place. She also knew she had no experience in mountain flying. If the Nazis were willing to help her mission so, she decided she had to accept. “Thank you,” she said.

“Heil Hitler!”
the
Luftwaffe
man answered, which did nothing to make her happier about working with Germans.

When she and Molotov went dip-clopping out to the airstrip next morning, she discovered the German ground crew had daubed the U-2’s wings and fuselage with splotches of whitewash. One of the fellows in overalls said, “Now you’ll look more like snow and rocks.”

Soviet winter camouflage was more thoroughly white, but snow drifted more evenly across the steppe than it did in mountains. She didn’t know how much the whitewash would help, but supposed it couldn’t hurt. The groundcrew man grinned as she thanked him in her accented German.

When she got a good look at the mountains toward which she was flying, she was glad she’d taken the
Luftwaffe
officer’s advice and not tried to make the trip by night. The landing field to which she was ordered lay not far outside the village of Berchtesgaden. When she set the
Kukuruznik
down there, she assumed Hitler’s residence lay within the village.

Instead, a long wagon ride up the side of the mountain—Obersalzberg, she learned it was called—followed. Molotov sat staring stonily straight ahead the whole way up. He said nothing much. Whatever went on behind the mask of his face, he kept it there. He glared right through the soldiers at two checkpoints, ignored the barbed wire that ringed the compound.

Hitler’s
Berghof
, when the wagon finally reached it, reminded Ludmila of a pleasant little resort house (the view was magnificent) swallowed up
by a residence that met the demands of a world leader. Molotov was whisked away into the
Berghof;
Ludmila thought she recognized his German counterpart, von Ribbentrop, from newsreels during the strange couple of years when the Soviet Union and Germany held to their friendship treaty.

She wasn’t important enough to be lodged in the
Berghof
. The Germans escorted her over to a guesthouse not far away. As she stood in the splendid lobby, all she could think was how many workers and peasants had had their labor exploited to create it. She was primly certain no one in the classless Soviet Union cared to live in such unnecessary splendor.

Down the staircase came an officer in the natty black uniform and beret of the German panzer formations: a colonel, by the two pips on each braided shoulder strap. On his right breast he wore a large, garish eight-pointed gold star with a swastika in the center. He was lean and perfectly shaved and looked quite at home here close by his
Führer;
just watching his smooth stride made Ludmila feel short, and dumpy and out of place. She swung the knapsack that held her few belongings over one shoulder.