Upsetting the Balance (12 page)

This time, Aleksandr German spoke to Vasiliev before he replied. Vasiliev’s answer was voluble but unintelligible, at least to Bagnall. Aleksandr German said, “It works better than we had expected, maybe because you Englishmen seem more honest than we had expected.”

When Bagnall translated that for Embry, the pilot said, “General Chill told us the same thing.”

“That’s the idea, old man,” Bagnall told him, and then turned the remark into German for the benefit of the partisan brigadiers. The Reds didn’t want Chill giving orders to their men, and he would sooner have swallowed his monocle than let them command his?but if Pskov didn’t have some sort of unified command, it would damn well fall. Both sides, then, appealed orders they reckoned unsatisfactory to the RAF men, and both sides had agreed to abide by their decisions. So far, both sides had.

“If you can keep the Nazis and us equally dissatisfied, you are doing well,” Aleksandr German said.

“Bloody wonderful,” Ken Embry muttered. Without a moment’s hesitation, Bagnall translated that as
“Ochen khorosho
—very good.” Here he was willing to sacrifice the spirit to preserve the letter—and good feeling all around.

Vasiliev and Aleksandr German walked over to study the situation map tacked up on the wall. The Lizards were still about twenty miles south of town. They hadn’t tried a big push in a while—
busy elsewhere,
Bagnall supposed—but the work of building new defensive lines against them went on day and night, not that Pskov had much night during high summer.

Bagnall waited for the Russians to ask something, complain about something, demand something. They didn’t. Vasiliev pointed to one of the defensive positions under construction and grunted a mouthful of consonants at Aleksandr German. The other partisan brigadier grunted back. Then they both left the room, maybe to go have a look at that position.

“That was too easy,” Embry said when they were gone.

“Can’t have disasters every day,” Bagnall said, though he wondered why not as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Given his own experience, disasters seemed almost as common as sparrows. He went on, “Can you tend the shop by yourself for half a moment? I’d like to get outside for a bit and stretch my legs.”

“Go ahead,” Embry answered. “I owe you one or two there, I think, and this is a bloody gloomy room.”

“Too right, and not just because it’s poorly lit, either,” Bagnall said. Embry laughed, but they both knew Bagnall hadn’t been joking.

When he escaped the massive medieval stone pile of the Pskov
Krom,
he let out a long sigh of relief. Now that summer truly was here, Pskov seemed a very pleasant place, or could have seemed such if you ignored war damage. Everything smelled fresh and green and growing, the weather was warm and pleasant, the sun smiled down from a bright blue sky ornamented with puffy little white clouds, linnets chirped, ducks quacked. The only trouble was, you had to go through eight months of frozen hell to get to the four nice ones.

The Lizards had bombed the Sovietsky Bridge (older Russians in Pskov, Bagnall had noted, sometimes still called it the Trinity Bridge) over the Pskova. Their accuracy was fantastically good, as the flight engineer noted with professional jealousy; they’d put one right in the middle of the span. Men could cross over the timbers laid across the gap, but machines couldn’t.

A German on a bicycle rode by and nodded to Bagnall.
“Heil Hitler!”
the fellow said, probably taking the Englishman for one of his own. Bagnall contented himself with a nod. Having Stalin for an ally had felt strange back in 1941. Having Stalin and Hitler both for allies felt surreal, as if the world had turned upside down.

“Well, it bloody well has,” Bagnall muttered.

Boards clumped under his feet as he crossed the bridge into the Zapsokvye district on the west side of the river. Behind a stone fence, which looked old enough to have been there before the city itself, stood the church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian on Primostye, its tall onion dome surmounted by an Orthodox cross with a diagonal below the horizontal arm.

Unlike a lot of the bigger buildings in the area, the church hadn’t been bombed. It looked run-down anyway, with paint peeling and pigeon droppings resembling snow on the green copper sheathing of the dome. Bagnall wondered if the Communists had let anybody worship in there since the Revolution.

A soldier in Red Army khaki was sitting on the fence that surrounded the church. He—no, she—waved to Bagnall. “
Zdrast’ye,
Tatiana Fyodorovna,” he said, waving back.

Tatiana Fyodorovna Pirogova swung down from the fence and strode toward him. Her blond curls gleamed in the bright sunshine. She was pretty—hell, she was more than pretty—in the broad-faced, flat-featured Russian way, and not even baggy Red Army tunic and trousers could altogether disguise her shape. As she came up to Bagnall, she ran her tongue over her full lower lip, as if she were contemplating what sort of
hors d’oeuvre
he’d make.

She probably was. She’d been after him ever since he’d coordinated the defense that beat back the last Lizard push against Pskov. Up till then, she’d been with Jerome Jones, the radarman Bagnall and Embry and Alf Whyte (poor Alf—he’d caught a bullet south of the city) had flown into Russia with an airborne set.

Not poaching on his countryman’s turf wasn’t what made Bagnall shy about taking advantage of Tatiana’s abundant charms. The Moisin-Nagant rifle with telescopic sight she wore slung over her right shoulder had a lot more to do with it. She was a sniper by trade, and a damn good one. Bagnall wasn’t in the least ashamed to admit she scared the whey out of him.

He pointed to the church and said,
“Schön.”
Tatiana understood a little German, though she didn’t speak it.

That luscious lip curled. She let loose with a spate of Russian he had no hope of following in detail. She repeated herself often enough, though, that after a while he got the gist: the church and everything it stood for were primitive, uncultured (an insult to conjure with, in Russian), superstitious rubbish, and too bad neither the Nazis nor the
Yashcheritsi
—Lizards—had managed to blow it to kingdom come.

Then she pointed to the church herself, mimed opening the door, and asked him a question so bluntly coarse that the bad language he’d picked up from Red Army officers and men let him understand it perfectly: did he want to go in there for a quick poke?

He coughed and choked and felt himself turn red. Not even English tarts were so bold, and Tatiana, maneater though she might have been, was no tart. He wished to God she’d been content with Jones instead of setting her sights on him. Stuttering a little, he said,
“Nyet. Spasebo, aber nyet.
No—thanks, but no.” He knew he was mixing his languages, but he was too rattled to care.

“Bourgeois,” Tatiana said scornfully. She turned on her heel and strode off, rolling her hips to show him what he was missing.

He was perfectly willing to believe there’d be never a dull moment in the kip with her. All the same, he’d sooner have bedded down with a lioness; a lioness couldn’t put one between your eyes at fifteen hundred yards. He hurried back over the Sovietsky Bridge toward the
Krom.
After an encounter with Tatiana, trying to figure out what the Lizards would do next struck him as a walk in the park.

Mutt Daniels hunkered down in the Swift and Company meat-processing plant behind an overturned machine whose gleaming blades suggested a purpose he’d sooner not have thought about. Was that something moving toward him in the gloom? In case it was, he fired a burst at it from his tommy gun. If it had been moving before, it didn’t afterwards, which was what he’d had in mind.

“Meat-processing plant, my ass,” he muttered. “This here’s a slaughterhouse, nothin’ else but.”

His thick Mississippi drawl didn’t sound too out of place, not when summer heat and humidity turned Chicago’s South Side Southern indeed. He wished he had a gas mask like the one he’d worn in France in 1918; the heat and humidity were also bringing out the stink of the slaughterhouse and the adjacent Union Stockyards, even though no animals had gone through the yards or the plant in the past few months. That smell would hang around near enough forever as to make no difference.

The huge bulks of the Swift meat factory, the Armour plant beside it on Racine Avenue, and the Wilson packing plant not far away formed the keystone to the American position in the south side of Chicago. The Lizards had bombed them from the air and shelled them to a fare-thee-well, but GIs still clung to the ruins. The ruins were too ruinous for tanks, too; if the Lizards wanted the Americans out, they’d have to get them out the hard way.

“Lieutenant Daniels!” That was Hank York, the radioman, who habitually talked in an excited squeak.

“What’s up, Hank?” Mutt asked without taking his eyes off the place where he thought he’d seen movement. He wasn’t used to being called “Lieutenant”; he’d joined up as soon as the Lizards invaded, and went in with two stripes because he was a First World War vet. He’d added the third one pretty damn quick, but he’d only gotten a platoon when the company commander, Captain Maczek, went down with a bad wound.

He didn’t much blame the Army for being slow to promote him. When the Lizards came, he’d been managing the Decatur Commodores, but in normal times who’d want a platoon leader nearer sixty than fifty? Hell, he’d been a backup catcher for the Cardinals before most of the guys he led were born.

But times weren’t normal, no way. He’d stayed alive in spite of everything the Lizards had thrown at him, and so he was a lieutenant.

Hank York said, “Sir, word from HQ is that the Lizards have asked to send somebody forward under a white flag to set up a truce to get the wounded out. He’ll be coming from that direction”—York pointed past a ruined conveyor belt—“in about ten minutes. They say you can agree to up to three hours.”

“Hold fire!” Mutt yelled, loud as he would have shouted for a runner to slide going into third. “Spread the word—hold fire. We may get ourselves a truce.”

Gunfire slowly died away. In the relative quiet, Bela Szabo, one of the fellows in the platoon who toted a Browning Automatic Rifle, let out a yip of glee and said, “Hot damn, a chance to smoke a butt without worryin’ about whether those scaly bastards can spot the coal.”

“You got that one right, Dracula,” Daniels answered the BAR man. Szabo’s nickname was used as universally as his own; nobody ever called him Pete, the handle he’d been born with. The cigarettes were also courtesy of Dracula, the most inspired scrounger Mutt had ever known.

The limit of vision in the ruined packing plant was about fifty feet; past that, girders, walls, and rubble obscured sight as effectively as leaves, branches, and vines in a jungle. Daniels jumped when a white rag on a stick poked out of a bullet-pocked doorway. He swore at himself, realizing he should have made a flag of truce, too. He jammed a hand in a pants pocket, pulled out a handkerchief he hadn’t been sure he still owned, and waved it over his head. It wasn’t very white, but it would have to do.

When nobody shot at him, he cautiously stood up. Just as cautiously, a Lizard came out of the doorway. They walked toward each other, both of them picking their way around and over chunks of concrete, pieces of pipe, and, in Mutt’s case, an overturned, half-burned file cabinet. The Lizard’s eyes swiveled this way and that, watching not only the floor but also for any sign of danger. That looked weird, but Mutt wished he could pull the same stunt.

He saluted and said, “Lieutenant Daniels, U.S. Army. I hear tell you want a truce.” He hoped the Lizards were smart enough to send out somebody who spoke English, because he sure as hell didn’t know their lingo.
Sam Yeager might understand it by now, if he’s still alive,
Mutt thought. He hadn’t seen Yeager since his ex-outfielder took some Lizard prisoners into Chicago a year before.

However strange the Lizards were, they weren’t stupid. The one in front of Mutt drew himself up to his full diminutive height and said, “I am Wuppah”—he pronounced each
p
separately—“smallgroup commander of the Race.” His English was strange to the ear, but Mutt had no trouble following it. “It is as you say. We would like to arrange to be able to gather up our wounded in this building without your males shooting at us. We will let you do the same and not shoot at your males.”

“No spying out the other side’s positions, now,” Daniels said, “and no moving up your troops to new ones under cover of the truce.” He’d never arranged a truce before, but he’d gathered up wounded in France under terms like those.

“It is agreed,” Wuppah said at once. “Your males also will not take new positions while we are not shooting at each other.”

Mutt started to answer that that went without saying, but shut his mouth with a snap. Nothing went without saying when the fellow on the other side had claws and scales and eyes like a chameleon’s (just for a moment, Mutt wondered how funny he looked to Wuppah). If the Lizards wanted everything spelled out, that was probably a good idea. “We agree,” Daniels said.

“I am to propose that this time of not shooting will last for one tenth of a day of Tosev 3,” Wuppah said.

“I’m authorized to agree to anything up to three hours,” Daniels answered.

They looked at each other in some confusion. “How many of these ‘hours’ have you in your day?” Wuppah asked. “Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-four,” Mutt answered. Everybody knew that—everybody human, anyhow, which left Wuppah out.

The Lizard made hissing and popping noises. “This three hours is an eighth part of the day,” he said. “It is acceptable to us that this be so: my superiors have given me so much discretion. For an eighth part of a day we and you will do no shooting in this big and ruined building, but will recover our hurt males and take them back inside our lines. By the Emperor I swear the Race will keep these terms.” He looked down at the ground with both eyes when he said that.

Truces with the
Boches
hadn’t required anybody to do any swearing, but the Germans and Americans had had a lot more in common than the Lizards and Americans did. “We’ll keep ’em, too, so help me God,” he said formally.