Tilting The Balance (11 page)

The Forward boasted a one-pounder mounted in front of the superstructure. “Will that thing do any good if the Lizards decide to strafe us?” Groves asked the Coast Guardsman in charge of the weapon.

“About as much as a mouse giving a hawk the finger when the hawk swoops down on it,” the sailor answered. “Might make the mouse feel better, for a second or two, anyhow, but the hawk’s not what you’d call worried.” In spite of that cold-blooded assessment, the man stayed at his post.

The way the Coast Guardsmen handled their jobs impressed Groves. They knew what they needed to do and they did it, without fuss, without spit and polish, but also without wasted motion. Lieutenant van Alen hardly needed to give orders.

The trip across the lake was long and boring. Van Alen invited Groves to take off his pack and stow it in the cabin. “Thank you, Lieutenant, but no,” Groves said. “My orders are not to let it out of my sight at any time, and I intend to take them literally.’

“However you like, sir,” the Coast Guardsman said. He eyed Groves speculatively. “That must be one mighty important cargo.”

“It is.” Groves let it go at that. He wished the heavy pack were invisible and weightless. That might keep people from jumping to such accurate conclusions. The more people wondered about what he was carrying, the likelier word was to get to the Lizards.

As if the thought of the aliens were enough to conjure them out of thin air, he heard the distant scream of one of their jet planes. His head spun this way and that, trying to spot the aircraft through scattered clouds. He saw the contrail, thin as a thread, off to the west.

“Out of Rochester, or maybe Buffalo,” van Alen said with admirable sangfroid.

“Do you think he saw us?” Groves demanded.

“Likely he did,” the Coast Guardsman said. “We’ve been buzzed a couple times, but never shot at. Just to stay on the safe side, we’ll crowd your men down below, where they won t show and look as ordinary as we can for a while. And if you won’t leave that pack in the cabin, maybe you’ll step in yourself for a bit.”

It was as politely phrased an order as Groves had ever heard. He outranked van Alen, but the Coast Guardsman commanded the Forward, which meant authority rested with him. Groves went inside, jammed his face against a porthole. With luck, he told himself the Lizard pilot would go on about his business, whatever that was. Without luck…

The throb of the engines was louder inside, so Groves needed longer to hear the shriek the Lizard plane made. That shriek grew hideously fast. He waited for the one-pounder on the foredeck to start banging away in a last futile gesture of defiance, but it stayed silent. The Lizard plane screamed low overhead. Through the porthole, Groves saw van Alen looking up and waving. He wondered if the Coast Guard lieutenant had gone out of his mind.

But the jet roared away, the scream of its engine fading and dopplering down into a deep-throated wail. Groves hadn’t known he was holding his breath until he let it out in one long sigh. When he couldn’t hear the Lizard plane any more, he went out on deck again. “I thought we were in big trouble there,” he told van Alen.

“Naah.” The Coast Guardsman shook his head. “I figured we were all right as long as they didn’t notice all your men on deck. They’ve seen the Forward out on the lake a good many times, and we’ve never done anything that looks aggressive. I hoped they’d just assume we were out on another cruise, and I guess they did.”

“I admire your coolness, Lieutenant, and I’m glad you didn’t have to show coolness under fire,” Groves said.

“You can’t possibly be half as glad as I am, sir,” van Alen answered. The Coast Guard cutter sailed on toward the Canadian shore.

In the midst of the trees – some bare-branched birches, more dark pine and fir – the ice-covered lake appeared as suddenly as a rabbit out of a magician’s hat. “By Jove,” George Bagnall exclaimed as the Lancaster bomber ducked down below treetop height to make it harder for Lizard radar to pick them up. “That’s a nice bit of navigating, Alf.”

“All compliments gratefully accepted,” Alf Whyte replied. “Assuming that’s actually Lake Peipus, we can follow it straight down to Pskov.”

From the pilot’s seat next to Bagnall, Ken Embry said, “And if it’s not, we don’t know where the bloody hell we are, and we’ll all be good and Pskoved.”

Groans filled the earphones on Bagnall’s head. The flight engineer studied the thicket of gauges in front of him. “It had better be Pskov,” he told Embry, “for we haven’t the petrol to go much farther.”

“Oh, petrol,” the pilot said airily. “We’ve done enough bizarre turns in this war that flying without petrol wouldn’t be that extraordinary.”

“Let me check my parachute first, if you don’t mind,” Bagnall answered.

In fact, though, Embry had a point. The aircrew had been over Cologne on the thousand-bomber raid when Lizard fighters started hacking British planes out of the sky by the score. They’d made it back to England and gone on to bomb Lizard positions in the south of France – where they were hit. Embry had set the crippled bomber down on a deserted stretch of highway by night without smashing or flipping it. If he could do that, maybe he could fly without petrol.

After getting to Paris and being repatriated with German help (that still grated on Bagnall), they’d been assigned to a new Lane, this one a testbed for airborne radar. Now, the concept being deemed proved, they were flying a set to Russia so the Reds would have a better chance of seeing the Lizards coming.

Ice, ice, close to a hundred miles of blue-white ice, with white snow drifted atop it. From the bomb bay, Jerome Jones, the radarman, said, “I looked up Pskov before we took off. The climate here is supposed to be mild; the proof adduced is that the snow melts by the end of March and the ice on the lakes and rivers in April.”

More groans from the aircrew. Bagnall exclaimed, “If that’s what the Bolshies make out to be a mild climate, what must they reckon harsh?”

“I’m given to understand Siberia has two seasons,” Embry said: “Third August and winter.”

“Good job we have our flight suits on,” Alf Whyte said. “I don’t think there’s another item in the British inventory that would do in this weather.” Below the Lane, Lake Peipus narrowed to a neck of water, then widened out again. The navigator went on, “This southern bit is called Lake Pskov.

We’re getting close.”

“If it’s all one lake, why has it got two names?” Bagnall asked.

“Supply the answer and win the tin of chopped ham, retail value ten shillings,” Embry chanted, like an announcer over the wireless. “Send your postal card to the Soviet Embassy, London. Winners – if there are any, which strikes me as unlikely-will be selected in a drawing at random.”

After another ten or fifteen minutes, the lake abruptly ended. A city full of towers appeared ahead. Some had the onion domes Bagnall associated with Russian architecture, while others looked as if they were wearing witches’ hats. The more modern buildings in town were scarcely worth noticing among such exotics.

“Right – here’s Pskov,” Embry said. “Where’s the bloody airfield?”

Down in the snow-filled streets, people scattered like ants when the Lancaster flew by. Through the bomber’s Perspex windscreen, Bagnall spied little flashes of light. “They’re shooting at us!” he yelled.

“Stupid sods,” Embry snarled. “Don’t they know we’re friendly? Now Where’s that bleeding airfield?”

Away to the east, a red flare rose into the sky. The pilot swung the big heavy aircraft in that direction. Sure enough, a landing strip appeared ahead, hacked out of the surrounding forest. “It’s none too long,” Bagnall observed.

“It’s what we’ve got.” Embry pushed forward on the stick. The Lancaster descended. The pilot was one of the best. He set the bomber down at the back edge of the landing strip and used up every inch braking to a stop. The tree trunks ahead were looking very thick and very hard when the Lancaster finally quit moving. Embry looked as if he needed to will himself to let go of the stick, but his voice was relaxed as he said, “Welcome to beautiful, balmy Pskov. You have to be balmy to want to come here.”

No sooner had the Lancaster’s three-bladed props spun to a stop than men in greatcoats and thick padded jackets dashed out of the trees to start draping it with camouflage netting. Groundcrews had done that back in England, but never with such elan. The outside world disappeared in a hurry; Bagnall could only hope the bomber disappeared from outside view as quickly.

“Did you see?” Embry asked quietly as he disconnected his safety belt.

“See what?” Bagnall asked, also freeing himself.

“Those weren’t all Russians out there covering us up. Some of them were Germans.”

“Bloody hell,” Bagnall muttered. “Are we supposed to give them the airborne radar, too? That wasn’t in our orders.”

Alf Whyte stuck his head out from the little black-curtained cubicle where he labored with map and ruler and compasses and protractor. “Before the Lizards came, Pskov was headquarters for Army Group North. The Lizards ran Jerry out, but then they left themselves when winter started. It’s Russian enough now for us to land here, obviously, but I expect there will be some leftover Nazis as well.”

“Isn’t that wonderful?” By Embry’s tone, it was anything but.

The cold hit like a blow in the face when the aircrew left the Lane. They were an abbreviated lot, pilot, flight engineer (Bagnall doubled as radioman), navigator, and radarman. No bomb-aimer on this run, no bombardiers, and no gunners in the turrets. If a Lizard jet attacked, machine guns weren’t going to be able to reply to its cannon and rockets.

“Zdrast’ye,” Ken Embry said, thereby exhausting his Russian. “Does anyone here speak English?”

“I do,” two men said, one with a Russian accent, the other in Germanic tones. They looked suspiciously at each other. Some months of joint battle against a common foe had not eased the memory of what they’d been doing to each other before the Lizards came.

Bagnall had done some German before he left college to join the
RAF
. That was only three years ago, but already most of it had vanished from his brain. Like most undergraduates taking German, he’d come upon Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language.” That he remembered, especially the bit about sooner declining two beers than one German adjective. And Russian was worse – even the alphabet looked funny.

To Bagnall’s surprise, Jerome Jones started speaking Russian – halting Russian, but evidently good enough to be understood. After a brief exchange, he turned back to the air crew and said,

“He – Sergei Leonidovich Morozkin there, the chap who knows a bit of English – says we’re to accompany him to the Krom, the local strongpoint, I gather.”

“By all means let us accompany him, then,” Embry said. “I didn’t know you had any Russian, Jones. The chaps who put this mission together had a better notion of what they were about than I credited them for.”

“I doubt that, sir,” Jones said, unwilling to give
RAF
higher-ups any credit for sense. But he had reason on his side: “When I was at Cambridge, I was interested for a while in Byzantine history and art, and that led me to the Russians. I hadn’t the time to do them properly, but I did teach myself a bit of the language. That wouldn’t be in any of my papers, though, so no one would have known of it.”

“Good thing it’s so, all the same,” Bagnall said, wondering if Jones was a Bolshevik himself. Even if he was, it didn’t matter now. “My German is villainous, but I was about to trot it out when you spoke up. I wasn’t what you’d call keen on trying to speak with our Soviet friends and allies in the language of a mutual foe.”

The German who spoke English said, “Against the Eidechsen – I am sorry, I do not know your word; the Russians call them Yashcheritsi – against the invaders from the sky, no men are foes to one another.”

“Against the Lizards, you mean,” Bagnall and Embry said together.

“Lizards.” Both the German and Morozkin, the anglophone Russian, echoed the word to fix it in their minds; it was one that would be used a good deal in days to come. The German went on, “I am Hauptmann – Captain aufEnglisch, ja? – Martin Borcke.”

As soon as the men of the aircrew had introduced themselves in turn, Morozkin said, “Come to Krom now. Get away from airplane.”

“But the radar-” Jones said plaintively. “We do. Is in box, da?” “Well, yes, but-”

“Come,” Morozkin said again. At the far end of the airstrip – a long, hard slog through cold and snow – three-horse sleighs waited to take the Englishmen into Pskov. Their bells jangled merrily as they set off, as If in a happy winter song. Bagnall would have found the journey more enjoyable had his Russian driver not had a rifle slung across his back and half a dozen German potato-masher grenades stuffed into his belt.

Pskov had been built in rings where two rivers came together. The sleigh slid past churches and fine houses in the center of town, many bearing it from the Soviets and when the Lizards struck north.

Closer to the joining of the two streams were a marketplace and another church. In the market, old women with scarves around their heads sold beets, turnips, cabbages. Steam rose from kettles of borscht. People queued up to get what they needed, not with the good spirits Englishmen displayed on similar occasions but glumly, resignedly, as if they could expect nothing better from fate.

Guards prowled the marketplace to make sure no one even thought of turning disorderly. Some were Germans with rifles and coal-scuttle helmets, many still wearing field-gray greatcoats. Others were Russians, carrying everything from shotguns to military rifles to submachine guns, and dressed in a motley mixture of civilian clothes and khaki Soviet uniform. Everyone, though – Germans, Russians, even the old women behind their baskets of vegetables – wore the same kind of thick felt boot.

The sleigh driver had on a pair, too. Bagnall tapped the fellow on the shoulder, pointed at the footgear. “What do you call those?” He got back only a smile and a shrug, and regretfully tried German: ‘Was sindsie?”

Comprehension lit the driver’s face. “Valenki.” He rattled off a couple of sentences in Russian before he figured out Bagnall couldn’t follow. His German was even slower and more halting than the flight engineer’s, which gave Bagnall a chance to understand it: “Gut – gegen – Kalt.”