Upsetting the Balance (23 page)

Other stretches, though, especially where the two big rivers joined, were just now fading. Irrigation ditches were nothing but muddy, weed-choked grooves in the ground. Here and there, farmers still cultivated small orchards and berry patches, but big stretches of land between them baked brown under the summer sun. Jens wondered what had gone wrong till he pedaled past the ruins of a pumping station, and then of another. If the water couldn’t reach land, the land wouldn’t bear.

The town nearest the Snake River bridge (not that Jens expected to find it standing) was called Burbank. Just before he got into it, he pulled off the highway to contribute his own bit of irrigation to the roadside plants. No sooner had he started to piss than he stopped again with a snarl of pain. Now he knew without having to think about it what that burning meant.

“
Another
dose of clap?” he howled to the sky, though that was not where he’d got it. The next week or two, till things calmed down in there, were going to be anything but fun.

Then, half to his own surprise, he started to laugh. From everything he’d heard, the clap didn’t usually make a woman as sore as it did a man, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have it. And this time, there was every chance he’d given as good—or as bad—as he’d got.

When Nikifor Sholudenko poked his head unannounced into the underground chamber where Ludmila Gorbunova slept and rested between missions, her first thought was that the NKVD man hoped to catch her half dressed. But Sholudenko said, “Comrade Pilot, you are ordered to report to Colonel Karpov’s office at once.”

That was different. That was business. Ludmila jumped to her feet. “Thank you, Comrade. Take me to him at once, please.”

Colonel Feofan Karpov was not a big man, but in his square solidity reminded Ludmila of a bear nonetheless. The stubble on his chin and the decrepit state of his uniform only added to the impression. So did the candles flickering in the underground office; they gave the place the look of a lair.

“Good day, Comrade Pilot,” Karpov said after returning Ludmila’s salute. His voice, which was on the reedy side, did not sound particularly ursine, not even when he growled, “That will be all, Comrade,” at Sholudenko. But the NKVD man disappeared even so.

“Good day, Comrade Colonel,” Ludmila said. “I report to you as ordered.”

“At ease, Ludmila Vadimovna—you’re not in trouble, certainly not from me,” Karpov said. Ludmila did not ease; the colonel was a stickler for military formality, and not in the habit of addressing her by name and patronymic. The first reason she came up with for his changing his tune was that he was going to make advances at her. If he did, she decided, she’d scream.

But instead of coming around the desk to lay a “comradely” hand on her shoulder or any such thing, he said, “I have orders for you to report to Moscow immediately. Well, not quite immediately.” He made a wry face. “A wagon is waiting above ground to transport you. It brought a replacement pilot and a replacement mechanic.”

“A replacement mechanic, Comrade Colonel?” Ludmila asked, puzzled.

“Da.”
Karpov scowled an angry bear’s scowl. “They are robbing me not only of one of my best pilots in you, but also of that German—Schultz—you roped into this unit. Whatever bungler they’ve sent me, he won’t measure up to the German; engines don’t care if you’re a fascist.”

The prospect of riding in to Moscow with Georg Schultz was less than appealing; the prospect of being paired with him on whatever mission followed the trip to Moscow was downright appalling. Hoping she might find out why the two of them had been ordered to the capital, she asked, “Where and to whom are we to report, Comrade Colonel?”

“To the Kremlin, or whatever may be left of the Kremlin after the Lizards have done their worst.” Karpov looked down at a scrap of paper on his desk. “The order is signed by a certain Colonel Boris Lidov of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior.” He saw Ludmila stiffen. “You know this man?”

“Yes, I know him, Comrade Colonel,” Ludmila said in a small voice. She glanced around out through the doorway to see if anyone was loitering in the hall.

Karpov’s gaze followed hers. “An NKVD bastard, eh?” he said roughly—but he didn’t raise his voice, either. “I thought as much, just from the way the order was framed. No help for it that I can see. Go gather your belongings and get into the wagon—you’ll see it when you come out of the tunnels here. Wear something civilian, if you can; it will make you less likely to be shot at from the air. And good luck to you, Ludmila Vadimovna.”

“Thank you, Comrade Colonel,” Ludmila saluted again, then walked back down the hall to her chamber. Mechanically, she packed up her flight suit, coveralls, and pistol. She had no civilian blouses, but at the bottom of her duffel bag she did find a flowered skirt. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn it.

When she came out of the tunnels, she blinked like a mole suddenly in daylight as she replaced the grass-covered netting that concealed the entrance. As Colonel Karpov had said, a high-wheeled
panje
wagon waited there, the driver in the baggy blouse, trousers, and boots of the
muzhik,
the horse making the most of the moment by pulling up weeds.

The wagon carried a load of straw. When Georg Schultz sat up in it, he looked like a scarecrow, although Ludmila had never seen a scarecrow with a coppery beard. He was dressed in his old
Wehrmacht
tunic and Red Army trousers; he didn’t have any civilian clothes this side of wherever in Germany he came from.

He grinned at her. “Come on back here with me,
liebchen,”
he said in his mixture of Russian and German.

“One minute.” She rummaged in her pack until she found the Tokarev automatic pistol. She belted it on, then climbed into the wagon. “You never listen to me when I tell you to keep your hands where they belong. Maybe you will listen to this.”

“Maybe.” He was still grinning. He’d faced worse things than pistols. “And maybe not.”

The driver twitched the reins. The horse let out a resentful snort, raised its head, and ambled off toward Moscow. The driver whistled something from Mussorgsky—after a moment, Ludmila recognized it as “The Great Gate of Kiev.” She smiled at the reference, no matter how oblique, to her hometown. But the smile quickly faded. Kiev had passed from the Nazis’ hands straight into those of the Lizards.

Although they moved ever farther from the front line, the countryside showed the scars of war. Bombs had cratered the dirt road that ran northeast toward Moscow; every couple of hundred meters, it seemed, the
panje
wagon had to rattle off onto the verge.

Georg Schultz sat up again, spilling straw in all directions. “These stinking dirt roads played hell with us, all through Russia. The map would say we were coming up to a highway, and it’d either be dust and dirt like this or mud when it rained. Didn’t seem fair. You damn Russians were so backwards, it ended up helping you.”

The driver didn’t move a muscle; he just kept driving. In spite of that, Ludmila would have bet he knew German. If he was from the NKVD, he’d have more talents than his rough-hewn exterior revealed.

Every so often, they’d pass the dead carcasses of tanks rocketed from the air by the Lizards before they ever reached the front. Some had been there long enough to start rusting. Most had their engine compartments and turret hatches open: the Soviets had salvaged whatever they could from the wreckage.

Even as scrap metal, the T-34s looked formidable. Pointing to one, Ludmila asked with no small pride, “And what did you think of those when you were up against them, Comrade Panzer Gunner?”

“Nasty buggers,” Schultz answered promptly, ignoring the ironic form of address. “Good armor, good gun, good engine, good tracks—all better than anything we had, probably. The gunsight, not so good. Not the two-man turret, either—the commander’s too busy helping the gunner to command the panzer, and that’s his proper job. He should have a cupola, too. And you need more panzers with wireless sets. Not having them hurt your tactics, and they weren’t that great to begin with.”

Now Ludmila hoped the driver was listening. She’d been aiming to twit the German tankman; she hadn’t expected such a serious, thoughtful answer. Being a Nazi didn’t automatically make a man a fool, no matter what propaganda claimed.

The journey in to Moscow took two days. They spent the first night in a stand of trees well off the road. The Lizards still flew by at night, smashing up whatever they could find.

Moscow, when they finally reached it, made Ludmila gasp in dismay. She’d last been there the winter before, after she’d flown Molotov to Germany. The Soviet capital had taken a beating then. Now . . .

Now it seemed that every building possibly large enough to contain a factory had been pounded flat. A couple of the onion domes of the Kremlin and St. Basil’s had crumpled. Walls everywhere were streaked with soot; the faint odor of wet, stale smoke hung in the air.

But people hadn’t given up.
Babushkas
sold apples and cabbages and beets on street corners. Soldiers carrying submachine guns tramped purposefully along. Horse-drawn wagons, some small like the one in which Ludmila rode, others pulled by straining teams, rattled and clattered. No guessing what they held, not with tarpaulins lashed down tight over their beds. If the Lizards couldn’t see what was in them, they wouldn’t know what to bomb. Flies droned around lumps of horse dung.

The driver knew which bridge over the Moscow River was in good enough repair to get them up to the Kremlin, and which parts of the battered heart of Moscow—of the Soviet Union—were still beating. He pulled the
panje
wagon up in front of one of those parts, stuck a feed bag on the horse’s head, and said, “I am to escort you to Colonel Lidov.” But for the snatches of whistling he’d let out from time to time, that was almost the first sound he’d made since he set out from the air base.

Some of the walls in the corridor were cracked, but the electric lights worked. Off in the distance, a petrol-fired generator chugged away to keep the lightbulbs shining. “Wish
we
had electricity,” Schultz muttered under his breath.

The corridor was not the one down which Ludmila had gone on her earlier meeting with Boris Lidov; she wondered if that part of the Kremlin still stood. The wagon driver opened a door, peered inside, beckoned to her and to Georg Schultz. “He will see you.”

Ludmila’s heart pounded in her chest, as if she were about to fly a combat mission. She knew she had reason to be nervous; the NKVD could kill you as readily, and with as little remorse, as the Germans or the Lizards. And Lidov had made plain what he thought of her after she got back from Germany. She might have gone to a
gulag
then, rather than back to her unit.

The NKVD colonel (Ludmila wondered if his promotion sprang from ability or simply survival) looked up from a paper-strewn desk. She started to report to him in proper military form, but Schultz beat her to the punch, saying breezily, “How goes it with you, Boris, you scrawny old prune-faced bastard?”

Staring, Ludmila waited for the sky to fall. It wasn’t that the description didn’t fit; it did, like a glove. But to say what you thought of an NKVD colonel, right to his prune face . . . Maybe he didn’t follow German.

He did. Fixing Schultz with a fishy stare, he answered in German much better than Ludmila’s: “Just because Otto Skorzeny could get away with speaking to me so, Sergeant, does not mean you can. He was more valuable than you are, and he was not under Soviet discipline. You, on the other hand—” He let that hang, perhaps to give Schultz the chance to paint horrid pictures in his own mind.

It didn’t work. Schultz said, “Listen, I was one of the men you sent on the raid that gave you people the metal for your bomb. If that doesn’t buy me the right to speak my mind, what does?”

“Nothing,” Lidov said coldly.

Ludmila spoke up before Schultz got himself shot or sent to a camp, and her along with him: “Comrade Colonel, for what mission have you summoned the two of us away from the front line?”

Lidov’s look suggested he’d forgotten she was there, and utterly forgotten he’d ordered the two of them to Moscow for any specific reason. After a moment, he collected himself and even laughed a little. That amazed Ludmila, who hadn’t suspected he could. Then he explained, “Curiously enough, it has to do with Soviet-German friendship and cooperation.” He’d answered Ludmila in Russian; he translated the reply into German for Schultz’s benefit.

The panzer gunner laughed, too. “Till the Lizards came, I was giving you cooperation, all right, fifty millimeters at a time.”

“What are we to do, Comrade Colonel?” Ludmila asked hastily. Lidov had warned Georg Schultz twice. Even once would have been surprising. Thinking he’d forbear three times running was asking for a miracle, and Ludmila, a good product of the Soviet educational system, did not believe in miracles.

Lidov’s chair squeaked as he turned in it to point to a map pinned to the rough plaster on the side of the wall. “Here by the lake—do you see it?—is the city of Pskov. It is still in the hands of mankind, although threatened by the Lizards. Some of the defenders are
Wehrmacht
troops, others partisan members of the Red Army.” He paused and pursed his lips. “Some friction in the defense has resulted from this.”

“You mean they’re shooting at each other, don’t you?” Schultz asked. Ludmila had wondered if he was too naive to see what lay beneath propaganda, but he proved he wasn’t. Göbbels probably used the same techniques as his Soviet counterparts, which would have sensitized Schultz to them.

“Not at present,” Lidov said primly. “Nonetheless, examples of cooperation might prove to have a valuable effect there. The two of you have done an admirable job of working together, by all the reports that have reached me.”

“We haven’t worked together all that close,” Schultz said with a sidelong glance at Ludmila. “Not as close as I’d like.”

She wanted to kick him right where it would do the most good. “By which you mean I don’t care to be your whore,” she snarled. Before she said something worse to him, something irremediable, she turned to Boris Lidov. “Comrade Colonel, how are we to get to Pskov?”