Tilting The Balance (21 page)

“Yeah, sure, Captain, I know that,” Daniels said. To himself, he added, I saw her first, though.

The U-2 droned through the night just above the treetops. The cold slipstream buffeted Ludmila Gorbunova’s face. It was not the only reason her teeth chattered. She was deep inside Lizardheld territory, If anything went wrong, she wouldn’t make it back to her dirt airstrip and the cramped little space she shared with the other female pilots.

She forced such thoughts from her mind, concentrated on the mission at hand. That was the only way to get through them, she’d learned: keep your mind firmly fixed on what you had to do now, then what you had to do next, and so on. Look ahead or off to one side and you were in trouble. That had been true against the Nazis; it was doubly so against the Lizards.

“What I have to do now,”she said, aloud, letting the slipstream fling her words away behind her, “is find the partisan battalion.”

Easier said than done, in what looked like endless stretches of forest and plain. She thought her navigation was good, but when you were flying by compass and wristwatch, little errors always crept in. She thought about gaining altitude so she could see farther, but rejected the idea. It would also have made it easier for the Lizards to spot her.

She worked the pedals and the stick, swung the U-2 into a wide, slow spiral to search the terrain below. The little wood-and-fabric biplane responded beautifully to the controls, probably better than it had when it was new. Georg Schultz, her German mechanic, might be – was – a Nazi, but he was also a genius at keeping the aircraft not only flying but flying well in spite of an almost complete lack of spare parts.

There down below – was that a light? It was, and a moment later she spotted the other two with it. She’d been told to look for an equilateral triangle of lights. Here they were. She buzzed slowly overhead, hoping the partisans had all their instructions straight.

They did. As goon as they heard the sewing-machine whine of the U-2’s little Shvetsov engine, they set out two more lights, little ones, that were supposed to mark out the beginning of a stretch of ground where she could land safely. Her mouth went dry, as it did every time she had to land at night on a strip or a field she’d never seen before. The Kukuruznikwas a rugged machine, but a mistake could still kill her.

She lined up on the landing lights, lost altitude, killed her airspeed – not that the U-2 had much to lose. At the last moment, the lights disappeared:

they must have had collars, to keep them from being seen at ground level. Losing them made her heart thump fearfully, but then she was down.

The biplane bounced along over the field. Ludmila hit the brakes hard; every meter she traveled was one more meter in which a wheel might go into a hole and flip the U-2 over. Fortunately, it did not need many meters in which to stop.

Men – dark shapes in darker night – came running up and got to the Kukuruznik \N\e the prop was still spinning. “You have presents for us, Comrade?” one of them called.

“I have presents,” Ludmila agreed. She heard the mutters when they heard her voice – variations on the theme of a woman! She was used to that; she’d been dealing with it ever since she joined the Red Air Force. But there were fewer such murmurs among the partisans than there had been at some air force bases to which she’d flown. A fair number of partisans were women, and most male partisans understood that women could fight.

She climbed down from the front cockpit, set a foot in the metal stirrup on the left side of the fuselage that gave access to the rear one. She didn’t go up into it, but started handing out boxes. “Here we are, Comrades: presents,” she said. “Rifles-with ammunition… submachine guns-with ammunition.”

“The weapons are good, but we already have most of the weapons we need,” a man said. “But next time you come, Comrade Pilot, bring us lots more bullets. It’s the ammunition we’re short of – we use a lot of it.” Wolflike chuckles rose from the partisans’ throats.

From back in the crowd of fighters, someone called, “Comrade, did you fetch us any 7.92mm ammunition? We have a lot of German rifles and machine guns we could use more if we had bullets for them.”

Ludmila hauled out a canvas bag that clinked metallically. The partisans’ murmurs turned appreciative; a couple of them clapped gloved hands together in delight. Ludmila said, “I am told to tell you: you cannot expect this bounty on every resupply run. We have to scavenge German cartridges – we don’t manufacture them. The way things are, we have a hard enough time manufacturing our own calibers.”

“Too bad,” said the man who had asked about German ammunition. “The Mauser is not a great rifle – accurate, da, but a slow, clumsy bolt – but the Nazis make a very fine machine gun.”

“Maybe we can work a trade,” the fellow who’d first greeted Ludmila said. “There’s a mostly German band of fighters back around Konotop, and they use our weapons just as we use theirs. They might swap some of their caliber for some of ours.”

Those couple of sentences spoke volumes about the anguish of the Soviet Union. Konotop, a hundred fifty kilometers east of Ludmila’s native Kiev, had been in German hands. Now it belonged to the Lizards. When would the Soviet workers and people be able to reclaim the rodina, the motherland?

Ludmila started handing out cardboard tubes and pots of paste. “Here you are, Comrades. Because wars are not won only by bullets, I bring also the latest posters by Efrimov and the Kukryniksi group.”

That drew pleased exclamations from the partisans. Newspapers hereabouts had been forced to echo the Nazi line; now they slavishly reproduced Lizard propaganda. Radios, especially those able to pick up signals from land still under human control, were few and far between. Posters gave one way of striking back. They could go up on a wall in seconds and show hundreds the truth for days.

“What do the men of Kukryniksi do this time?” a woman asked.

“It’s one of their better ones, I think,” Ludmila said, which was no small praise, for the team of Kupryanov, Krylov, and Sokolov probably turned out the best Soviet poster art. She went on, “This one shows a Lizard in Pharaoh’s headdress lashing Soviet peasants; the caption reads, ‘A Return to Slavery.’”

“That is a good one,” the partisan leader agreed. “It will make the people think, and make them less likely to collaborate with the Lizards. We will post it widely, in towns and villages and at collective farms.”

“How much collaboration goes on with the Lizards?” Ludmila asked. “This is something of which our authorities need to be aware.”

“It’s not as bad as what went on with the Germans at first,” the man answered. Ludmila nodded; little could be as bad as that. Large segments of the Soviet populace had welcomed the Nazis as liberators in the early days of their invasion. If they’d played on that instead of working to prove they could be even more savage and brutal than the
NKVD
, they might have toppled the Soviet regime. The partisan went on, “We do have collaboration, though. Many people passively accept whatever power they find above them, while others welcome the rather indifferent rule of the Lizards as superior to the hostility they had known before.”

“Hostility from the fascists, you mean,” Ludmila said.

“Of course, Comrade Pilot.” The partisan leader’s voice was innocence personified. No one could safely speak of hostility to the people from the Soviet government, though that shadow lay across the whole of the rodina.

“You called the Lizards’ rule indifferent,” Ludmila said. “Explain that more fully, please. Intelligence is worth more than many rifles.”

“They take crops and livestock for themselves; in the towns, they try to set up manufacturers that might be useful to them: forges and chemical works and such. But they care nothing for what we do as people,” the partisan said. “They do not forbid worship, but they do not promote it, either. They do not even forbid the Party, which would be only elementary prudence on their part. It is as If we are beneath their notice unless we take up arms against them. Then they hit hard.”

That much Ludmila already knew. The other perplexed her. By the sound of his voice, it perplexed the partisan, too. They were used to a regime that minutely regulated every aspect of its citizens’ lives – and disposed of them without mercy when they didn’t meet its expectations… or sometimes even If they did. Simple indifference seemed very alien by contrast. She hoped her superiors would have a better idea of what to make of it.

“Does anyone have letters for me?” she asked. “I’ll be glad to take them along, though with the post as disrupted as it is, they may be months on the way.”

The partisans queued up to hand her their notes to the outside world. None of them had envelopes; those had been in short supply before the Lizards came. The papers were folded into triangles to show they came from soldiers: the Soviet mail system carried such letters, albeit slowly, without a postage fee.

When she had the last letter, Ludmila climbed back into the front cockpit and said, “Would you please swing my aircraft around nose for tail? If I landed safely on this strip, I’d like to take off down the same ground.”

The little U-2 was easy to haul around by hand; it weighed less than a thousand kilos. Ludmila had to explain to someone how to turn the prop. As always on these missions, she had an anxious moment wondering whether the engine would start

– no mechanical starter here If it didn’t. But it was still warm from the flight in, and kicked over almost at once.

She released the brake, pushed the stick forward. The Kukuruznik jounced over the rough field. A few partisans ran alongside, waving. They soon fell behind. The takeoff run was longer than the one she’d needed to land. That meant she was going over some new terrain (to say nothing of the holes she might have missed while she was landing). But after a last couple of jolts, the biplane made an ungainly leap into the air.

She swung the U-2 north and west, back toward the base from which she’d set out. Finding it again would take the same kind of search she’d needed to locate the partisans’ makeshift airstrip. A base that advertised its presence soon drew the attention of the Lizards. Once that happened, the base was unlikely to remain present for long.

Not that she had any guarantees of getting back safely, anyhow. U-2s were detected and destroyed less often than any other Soviet aircraft; Ludmila’s best guess was that they were too small and light and flimsy to be noticed most of the time. But Kukuruzniks did not always come home, either.

Off in the distance, she saw flashes, like heat lightning on a summer evening: someone’s artillery, probably the Lizards’. She glanced at her watch and compass, made the best position estimate she could. When she landed, she’d report it to Colonel Karpov. Maybe one day before too long, the partisans would fire a rack of Katyusha rockets that way.

Stars twinkled through gaps in the clouds. A couple of times, she spotted brief twinkles of light on the ground, too: muzzle flashes. They made the stars seem less safe and friendly.

Watching the compass and her watch, she flew on toward the base. When she thought she was overhead, she looked down and saw – nothing.

That failed to surprise her; finding it on the first try by dead reckoning was no likelier than plunging your hand into a haystack and bringing out a needle between thumb and forefinger.

She began another search spiral. Now she watched her fuel gauge, too. If she was lost and had to set down in a field, she wanted to do it while she still had power, not dead stick.

Just when she was beginning to worry she might have to do exactly that, she spied the lights she’d been looking for. She gratefully made for them; knowing where you were made you feel ever so much more in control of things.

The airstrip had supposedly been leveled. As a matter of fact, it was no smoother than the one the partisans had marked off for her. Ludmila’s teeth clicked together at every jolt until the U-2 stopped. She told herself the roughness made the runway harder to spot. Was that consolation enough for the bruises she’d have wherever her safety harness touched her? Maybe.

She unbuckled the harness, got out of the plane while the prop was still spinning. The groundcrew ran up, hauled the Kukuruznik away to its between -missions home in a camouflaged revetment. “Where’s Colonel Karpov?” she asked.

“He went to bed an hour ago,” somebody answered. “It is close to three in the morning. You have anything so important it won’t keep till dawn?”

“I suppose not,” she said. The Lizard artillery wasn’t something he had to know about right now. She followed the Kukuruznik toward its shelter.

Ludmila would have bet as much money as she had that she’d find Georg Schultz waiting at the revetment. Sure enough, there he was. “Alles W?orosho?”he asked in his usual mixture of German and Russian.

“Gut, cfa,”she answered, mixing the languages the same way.

He scrambled up into the cockpit No lantern was lighted, not even beneath the camouflage netting; the Lizards had gadgets that could pick up the tiniest gleam. That didn’t stop Schultz from starting to work on Ludmila’s biplane. He tested the pedals and other controls, leaned out to say, “Left aileron cable not good – feels a little loose. Come light, I fix.”

“Thank you, Georgi Mikhailovich,” Ludmila answered. She hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the cable, but If Schultz said it needed tightening, she was willing to believe him. His understanding for machinery was, to her way of thinking, all but uncanny. She flew the aircraft; Georg Schultz projected himself into it as if he were part plane himself.

“Nothing else bad,” he said, “but here – you leave on floor.”

He handed her a folded triangle of paper.

“Thank you,” she said again. “Our post is unreliable enough without me losing a letter before it ever gets into the mail.” She wasn’t sure how much of that he understood, but found herself yawning enormously. She was too tired to try to dredge up German to make things clear for him. If Colonel Karpov was asleep, she saw no reason she shouldn’t grab a couple of hours for herself, too.

She shrugged out of her parachute harness – not that she’d have much chance to use a chute if she got hit while she was hedgehopping the way she usually did – and stowed it in the cockpit, then started out of the revetment toward her sleeping quarters. As she passed Georg Schultz, he patted her on the backside.