Tilting The Balance (24 page)

“Too true.” Embry tugged at his shlem – sort of a balaclava that didn’t cover his nose or mouth – so it did a better job of keeping his neck warm. “And I don’t like the tin hat they’ve kitted me out with, either.”

“Then don’t wear it. I don’t fancy mine, now that you mention it.” Along with Mauser rifles, both Englishmen had received German helmets. Wearing that coal scuttle with its painted swastika set Bagnall’s teeth on edge, to say nothing of worrying him lest he be mistaken for a Nazi by some Russian more eager for revenge against the Germans than to attack the Lizards.

“Don’t like to leave it off, either,” Embry said. “Puts me too much in mind of the last war, when they went for a year and a half with no tin hats at all.”

“That is a poser,” Bagnall admitted. Thinking about the infinite slaughter of World War I was bad enough anyhow. Thinking how bad it had been before helmets was enough to make your stomach turn over.

Alf Whyte came walking toward them. He had his helmet on, which made his silhouette unnervingly Germanic. He said, “You chaps ready to find out about the way our fathers fought?”

“Sod our fathers,” Bagnall muttered. He stamped his feet up and down. Russian felt boots kept them warm; boots were the one part of his flying suit he’d willingly exchanged for their local equivalents.

Other small groups of men gathered in Pskov’s market square, chatting softly among themselves in Russian or German. It was a more informal muster than any Bagnall had imagined; the occasional female voice among the deeper rumbles only made the scene seem stranger.

The women fighters were as heavily bundled against the cold as their male counterparts. Pointing to a couple of them, Embry said, “They don’t precisely put one in mind of Jane, do they?”

“Ah, Jane,” Bagnall said. He and Alf Whyte both sighed. The Daily Mirror’s marvelous comic-strip blonde dressed in one of two ways: very little and even less. Bagnall went on, “Even Jane would dress warmly here. And the Russians, even dressed like Jane, wouldn’t much stir me. The ones I’ve seen are most of them lady dockwallopers or lorry drivers.”

“Too right,” Whyte said. “This is a bloody place.” All three Englishmen nodded glumly.

A couple of minutes later, officers – or at least leaders – moved the fighters out. Bagnall’s rifle was heavy; it made him feel lopsided and banged his shoulder at every step he took. At first it drove him to distraction. Then it became only a minor nuisance. By the time he’d gone a mile or so, he stopped noticing it.

He did expect to see some difference in the way the Russians and Germans went off to war. German precision and efficiency were notorious, while the Red Army, although it had a reputation for great courage, was not long on spit and polish. He soon found what such cliches were worth. He couldn’t even tell the two groups apart by their gear: many Russian partisans bore captured German equipment, while about an equal number of Hitler’s finest eked out their own supplies with Soviet stocks.

They even marched the same way, in loose, widespread groups that got looser and more spread out as the sun rose. “We might do well to emulate them,” Bagnall said. “They have more experience at this kind of thing than we do.”

“I suppose it’s to keep too many from going down at once if they’re caught out in the open by aircraft,” Ken Embry said.

“If we’re caught out in the open, you mean,” Alf Whyte corrected him. As If with one accord, the three
RAF
men spread out a little farther.

Before long, they entered the forest south of Pskov. To Bagnall, used to neat, well-trimmed English woods, it was like stepping into another world. These trees had never been harvested; he would have bet money that many of them had never been seen by mortal man till this moment. Pine and fir and spruce held invaders at bay with their dark-needled branches, as if the only thing they wanted in all the world was for the men to go away. The occasional pale gray birch trunks among them startled Bagnall each time he went past one; they reminded him of naked women (he thought again of Jane) scattered among matrons properly dressed for the cold.

Off in the distance, something howled. “A wolf!” Bagnall said, and grabbed for his rifle before he realized there was no immediate need. Wolves had been hunted out of England for more than four hundred years, but he reacted to the sound by instinct printed on his flesh by four hundred times four hundred generations.

“We’re rather a long way from home, aren’t we?” Whyte said with a nervous chuckle; he’d started at the wolf call, too.

“Too bloody far,” Bagnall said. Thinking about England brought him only pain. He tried to do it as little as he could. Even battered and hungry from war, it felt infinitely more welcoming than wrecked Pskov, tensely divided between Bolsheviks and Nazis, or than this forbidding primeval wood.

In amongst the trees, the almost eternal ravening wind was gone. That let Bagnall grow as nearly warm as he’d been since his Lancaster landed outside Pskov. And Jerome Jones had said the city was known for its mild climate. Trudging through snow as spring began gave the lie to that, at least If you were a Londoner. Bagnall wondered if spring ever truly began here.

Alf Whyte said, “What precisely is our mission, anyhow?”

“I was talking with a Jerry last night.” Bagnall paused, and not just to take another breath. He had a little German and no Russian, so he naturally found it easier to talk with the Wehrmacht men than with Pskov’s rightful owners. That bothered him. He was so used to thinking of the Germans as enemies that dealing with them in any way felt treasonous, even if they loved the Lizards no better than he.

“And what did the Jerry say, pray tell?” Whyte asked when he didn’t go on right away.

Thus prompted, Bagnall answered, “There’s a Lizard… I don’t know what exactly-forward observation post, little garrison, something – about twenty-five kilometers south of Pskov. We’re supposed to put paid to it.”

“Twenty-five kilometers?” As a navigator, Whyte was used to going back and forth between metric and imperial measures. “We’re to hike fifteen miles through the snow and then fight? It’ll be nightfall by the time we get there.”

“I gather that’s pare of the plan,” Bagnall said. Whyte’s scandalized tone showed what an easy time England had had in the war. The Germans and, from what Bagnall could gather, the Russians took the hike for granted: just one more thing they had to do. They’d done worse marches to get at each other the winter before.

He munched cold black bread as he shuffled along. While he paused to spend a penny against the trunk of a birch tree, a Lizard jet wailed by, far overhead. He froze, wondering if the enemy could have spotted the advancing human foes. The trees gave good cover, and most of the fighters wore white smocks over the rest of their clothes. Even his own helmet had whitewash splashed across it.

The leaders of the combat group (or so his German of the night before had called it) took no chances. They hurried the fighters along and urged them to scatter even more widely than before. Bagnall obeyed, but worried. He’d thought nothing could be worse than fighting in these grim woods. But suppose he got lost in them instead? The shiver that brought had nothing to do with cold.

On and on and on. He felt as If he’d marched a hundred miles already. How was he to fight after a slog like this? The Germans and Russians seemed to think nothing of it. A British Tommy might have felt the same, but the
RAF
let machines carry warriors to combat. In a Lane, Bagnall could do things no infantry could match. Now, quite literally, he found the shoe on the other foot.

The sun swung through the sky. Shadows lengthened, deepened. Somehow, Bagnall kept up with everyone else. As shadows gave way to twilight, he saw the men ahead of him going down on their bellies, so he did, too. He slithered forward. Through breaks in the forest he saw a few houses – huts, really – plopped down in the middle of a clearing. “That’s it?” he whispered.

“How the devil should I know?” Ken Embry whispered back. “Somehow, though, I don’t think we’ve been invited here for high tea.”

Bagnall didn’t think the village had ever heard of high tea. By its look, he wondered if it had heard of the passing of the tsars. The wooden buildings with carved walls and thatched roofs looked like something out of a novel by Tolstoy. The only hint of the twentieth century was razor wire strung around a couple of houses. No one, human or Lizard, was in sight.

“It can’t be as easy as it looks,” Bagnall said.

“I’d like it if it were,” Embry answered. “And who says it can’t? We-”

Off in the distance a small pop! interrupted him. Bagnall had been involved in dropping countless tons of bombs and had been on the receiving end of more antiaircraft fire than he cared to think about, but this was the first time he’d done his fighting on the ground. The mortar tired again and again, fast as its crew – Bagnall didn’t know whether they were Russians or Germans – could serve it with bombs.

Snow and dirt fountained upward as the mortar rounds hit home. One of the wooden houses caught fire and began to burn merrily. Men in white burst from the trees and dashed across the clearing: Bagnall wondered if the village really was a Lizard outpost after all.

He fired the Mauser, worked the bolt, fired again. He’d trained on a Lee-Enfield, and vastly preferred it to the weapon he was holding. Instead of angling down to where it was easy to reach, the Mauser’s bolt stuck straight out, which made quick firing difficult, and the German rifle’s magazine held only five rounds, not ten.

Other rifles started hammering, and a couple of machine guns, too. Still no response came from the village. Bagnall began to feel almost sure they were attacking a place empty of the enemy. Relief and rage fought in him – relief that he wasn’t in danger after all, rage that he’d made that long, miserable march in the snow.

Then one of the white-cloaked figures flew through the air, torn almost in two by the land mine he’d stepped on. And then muzzle flashes began winking from a couple of the village buildings as the Lizards returned fire. The charging, yelling humans began to go down as if scythed.

Bullets kicked up snow between Bagnall and Embry, whacked into the trees behind which they hid. Bagnall hugged the frozen earth like a lover.

Shooting back was the last thing on his mind. This was, he decided in an instant, a much uglier business than war in the air. In the Lane, you dropped your bombs on people thousands of feet below. They shot back, yes, but at your aircraft, not at your precious and irreplaceable self. Even fighter aircraft didn’t go after you personally – their object was to wreck your plane, and your gunners were trying to do the same to them. And even if your aircraft got shot down, you might bail out and survive.

It wasn’t machine against machine here. The Lizards were doing their best to blow large holes in his body so he’d scream and bleed and die. Their best seemed appallingly good, too. Every one of however many Lizards there were in the village had an automatic weapon that spat as much lead as one of the raiders’ machine guns and many times as much as a bolt-action rifle like his Mauser. He felt like Kipling’s Fuzzy-Wuzzy charging a British square.

But you couldn’t charge here, not if you felt like living. The Russians and Germans who’d tried it were most of them down, some chewed to bits by a hail of bullets, others shredded like the first luckless fellow by stepping on a mine. The few still on their feet could not go forward. They fled for the shelter of the woods.

Bagnall turned to Embry, shouted, “I think we just stuck our tools in the meat grinder.”

“Whatever gave you that idea, dearie?” Even in the middle of battle, the pilot managed to come up with a high, shrill falsetto.

In the gathering gloom, one of the houses in the village began to move. At first Bagnall rubbed his eyes, wondering if they were playing tricks on him. Then, after Mussorgsky, he thought of the Baba Yaga, the witch’s hut that ran on chicken’s legs. But as the wooden walls fell away, he saw that this house moved on tracks. “Tank!” he screamed. “It’s a bleeding tank!”

The Russians were yelling the same thing, save with a broad a rather than his sharp one. The Germans screamed “Panzer!” instead. Bagnall understood that, too. He also understood that a tank – no, two tanks now, he saw – meant big trouble.

Their turrets swiveled toward the heaviest firing. Machine guns opened up on them as they did so; streams of bullets struck sparks from their armor. But they’d been made to withstand heavier artillery than most merely Earthly tanks commanded – the machine guns might as well have been firing feathers.

Their own machine guns started shooting, muzzle flashes winking like fireflies. One of the raiders’ machine guns – a new German one, with such a high cyclic rate that it sounded like a giant ripping an enormous canvas sail when it opened up – abruptly fell silent. It started up again a few seconds later. Bagnall admired the spirit of the men who had taken over for its surely fallen crew.

Then the main armament of one of the tanks spoke, or rather bellowed. From less than half a mile away, it sounded to Bagnall like the end of the world, while the tongue of flame it spat put him in mind of hellmouth opening. The machine gun stopped firing once more, and this time did not open up again.

The other tank’s cannon fired, too, then slowed so it pointed more nearly in Bagnall’s direction. He scrambled deeper into the woods: anything to put more distance between himself and that hideous gun.

Ken Embry was right with him. “How the devil do you say, ‘Run like bloody hell!’ in Russian?” he asked.

“Not a phrase I’ve learned, I’m afraid, but I don’t believe the partisans need our advice in that regard,” Bagnall answered. Russians and Germans alike were in full retreat, the tanks hastening on their way – and hastening too many of them into the world to come – with more cannon rounds. Shell splinters and real splinters blown off trees hissed through the air with deadly effect.

“Someone’s reconnaissance slipped up badly,” Embry said. “This was supposed to be, an infantry outpost. No one said a word about going up against armor.”