Tilting The Balance (25 page)

Bagnall only grunted. What Embry had said was self-evidently true. Men were dying because of it. His main hope at present was not being one who did. Through the crash of the cannon, he heard another noise, one he didn’t recognize: a quick, deep thutter that seemed to come out of the air.

“What’s that?” he said. Beside him, Embry shrugged. The Russians were running faster than ever, crying “Vertolyet!” and “Avtozhir.” Neither word, unfortunately, meant anything to Bagnall.

Fire came out of the sky from just above treetop height: streaks of flame as if from a Katyusha launcher taken aloft and mounted on a flying machine instead of a truck. The woods exploded into flame as the rocket warheads detonated. Bagnall shrieked like a lost soul, but couldn’t even hear himself.

Whatever had fired the rockets, it wasn’t an ordinary airplane. It hung in the sky, hovering like a mosquito the size of a young whale, as it loosed another salvo of rockets on the humans who had presumed to attack a Lizard position. More deadly shrapnel flew. Buffeted, half stunned by the blast, Bagnall lay flat on the ground, as he might have during a great earthquake, and prayed the pounding would end.

But another helicopter came whickering up from the south and poured two more salvos of rockets into the raiders’ ranks. Both machines hovered overhead and raked the forest with machinegun fire. The tanks came crashing closer, too, smashing down everything that stood in their way but the bigger trees.

Somebody booted Bagnall in the backside, hard. “Get up and run, you bloody twit!” The words were in English. Bagnall turned his head. It was Ken Embry, his foot drawn back for another kick.

“I’m all right,” Bagnall said, and proved it by getting up. As soon as he was on his pins again, adrenaline made him run like a deer. He fled north – or, at any rate, away from the tanks and the helicopters’ killing ground. Embry matched him stride for desperate stride. Somewhere in their mad dash, Bagnall gasped out, “Where’s Alf?”

“He bought his plot back there, I’m afraid,” Embry answered.

That hit Bagnall like – like a machinegun round from one of the deathships up there, he thought. Watching Russians and Germans he didn’t know getting shot or blown to bits was one thing. Losing someone from his own crew was ten times worse – as if a flak burst had torn through the side of his Lancaster and slaughtered a bombardier. And since Whyte was – had been – one of the three other men in Pskov with whom he could speak freely, he felt the loss all the more.

Bullets still slashed the woods, most of them, though, behind the fleeing Englishmen now. The Lizards’ tanks did not press the pursuit as aggressively as they might have. “Maybe they’re afraid of taking a Molotov cocktail from someone up a tree whom they don’t spy till too late,” Embry suggested when Bagnall said that out loud.

“Maybe they are,” the flight engineer said. “I’m damned sure I’m afraid of them.”

The gunfire and rockets and cannon rounds had left his ears as dazed as any other part of him. Dimly, as If from far away, he heard screams of terror and the even more appalling shrieks of the wounded. One of the helicopters flew away, then, after a last hosing of the woods with bullets, the other one. Bagnall looked down at his wrist. The glowing hands of his watch said only twenty minutes had gone by since the first shots were fired. Those twenty minutes of hell had stretched for an eternity. Though not ordinarily a religious man, Bagnall wondered how long a real eternity of hell would seem to last.

Then his thoughts snapped back to the present, for he almost stumbled over a wounded Russian lying in a pool of blood that looked black against the snow at night. “Bozhemoi,”the Russian moaned. “Bozhemoi.”

“My God,” Bagnall gasped, unconsciously translating. “Ken, come over here and help me. It’s a woman.”

“I hear.” The pilot and Bagnall stooped beside the wounded partisan. She pressed a hand against her side, trying to stanch the flow of blood.

As gently as he could, Bagnall undid her quilted coat and tunic so he could see the wound. He had to force her hand away before he could bandage it with gauze from his aid kit. She groaned and thrashed and weakly tried to fight him off.

“Nemtsi,” she wailed.

“She thinks we’re Jerries,” Embry said. “Here, give her this, too.” He pressed a morphia syrette into Bagnall’s hand.

Even as he made the injection, Bagnall thought it a waste of precious drug: she wasn’t going to live. Her blood had already soaked the bandage. Maybe a hospital could have saved her, but here in the middle of a frozen nowhere… “Artzt!” he yelled in German. “Gibt es Artzt hier? Is there a doctor here?”

No one answered. He and Embry and the wounded woman might have been alone in the woods. She sighed as the morphia bit into her pain, took a couple of easy breaths, and died.

“She went out peacefully, anyhow,” Embry said; Bagnall realized the pilot hadn’t thought she’d make it, either. He’d done her the last favor he could by freeing her death from agony.

Bagnall said, “Now we have to think about staying alive ourselves.” In the middle of the cold woods, after a crushing defeat that showed only too clearly how the Lizards had seized and held great stretches of territory from the mightiest military machines the world had known, that seemed to require considerable thought.

Liu Han called, “Come and see the foreign devil do amazing things with stick and ball and glove. Come and see! Come and see!”

Mountebanks of all sorts could be sure of an audience in the Chinese refugee camp. Behind her, Bobby Fiore tossed into the air the leather-covered ball he’d had made. Instead of catching it in his hands, he tapped it lightly with his special stick – a bat, he called it. The ball went a couple of feet into the air, came straight down. He tapped it up again and again and again. All the while, he whistled a merry tune.

“See!” Liu Han pointed to him. “The foreign devil juggles without using his hands!”

A spattering of applause came from the crowd. Three or four people tossed coins into the bowl that lay by Liu Han’s feet. Some others set rice cakes and vegetables on the mat next to the bowl. Everyone understood that entertainers had to eat or they wouldn’t be able to entertain.

When no donations came for a minute or so, Bobby Fiore tapped the ball up one last time, caught it in his free hand, and glanced toward Liu Han. She looked out into the crowd and said, “Who will play a game where, if he wins, the foreign devil will look ridiculous? Who will try this simple game?”

Several men shouted and stepped toward her. Nothing delighted Chinese more than making a European or American into an object of ridicule. Liu Han pointed toward the bowl and the mat: If they wanted to play, they had to pay. A couple of them made their offerings without a word, but one asked belligerently, “What is this game?”

Bobby Fiore handed her the ball. She held it up in one hand, bent to pick up a flat canvas bag stuffed with rags which she displayed in the other. Then she put the bag back on the ground, gave the ball to the belligerent man. “A simple game, an easy game,” she said. “The foreign devil will stand well back and then run toward the bag. All you have to do is stand in front of it and touch him with the ball before he reaches it. Win and you get back your stake and twice as much besides.”

“That is easy.” The man with the ball puffed out his chest and tossed a silver trade dollar into the bowl. It rang sweetly. “I will put the ball on him, no matter what he does.”

Liu Han turned to the crowd. “Clear a path, please. Clear a path so the foreign devil can run.” Chattering among themselves, the people moved aside to form a narrow lane. Bobby Fiore walked down it. When he was almost a hundred feet from the man with the ball, he turned and bowed to him. The arrogant fellow did not return his courtesy. A couple of people clucked reproachfully at that, but most didn’t think a foreign devil deserved much courtesy.

Bobby Fiore bowed again, then ran straight at the man with the ball. The Chinese man clutched it in both hands, as if it were a rock. He set himself for a collision as Fiore bore down on him.

But the collision never came. At the last instant, Fiore threw himself to the ground on his hip and thigh and hooked around the clumsy lunge the man made with the ball. His foot came down on the stuffed bag. “Safe!” he yelled in his own language.

Liu Han didn’t quite know what safe meant, but she knew it meant he’d won. “Who’s next?” she called, taking the ball from the disgruntled Chinese man.

“Wait!” he said angrily, then turned and played to the crowd: “You all saw that! The foreign devil cheated me!”

Fear coursed through Liu Han. She called Bobby Fiore yang kwei-tse – foreign devil – herself, but only to identify him. In the angry man’s mouth, it was a cry to turn an audience into a mob.

Before she could answer, Fiore spoke for himself in clumsy Chinese: “Not cheat. Not say let win. He quick, he win. He slooow.” He stretched the last word out in a way no native Chinese would have used, but one insultingly effective.

“He’s right, Wu – you missed him by a li,” someone yelled from the crowd. The miss hadn’t really been a third of a mile, but it hadn’t been close, either.

“Here, give me the ball now,” someone else said. “I’ll put it on the foreign devil.” He said yang kwei-tse the same way Liu Han did, to name Bobby Fiore, not to revile him.

Liu Han pointed to the bowl. As Wu stamped away, the next player tossed in some paper money from Manchukuo. It wasn’t worth as much as silver, and Liu Han did not like it because of what Manchukuo’s Japanese puppet masters had done to China – and to her own family, just before the Lizards came. But the Japanese were still fighting hard against the Lizards, which gave them prestige they hadn’t had before. She let the bills lay, handed the man the ball.

Bobby Fiore brushed dirt off his pants, shooed the spectators back so he could take his running start. The Chinese man stood in front of the bag, holding the ball in his left hand and leaning left, as if to make sure Fiore wouldn’t use on him the trick that had fooled the first player.

Bobby Fiore ran down the aisle of chattering Chinese, as before. When he got within a couple of strides of the waiting Chinese, he took a small step in the direction the fellow was leaning. “Ha!” the man cried in triumph, and brought the ball down.

But Bobby Fiore was not there to be tagged. After that small step made the man commit himself, Fiore took a long, hard stride on his other leg, changing directions as nimbly as any acrobat Liu Han had ever seen. The man tagged to the left; Bobby Fiore slid to the right. “Safe!” he yelled again.

The man with the ball ruefully flipped it to Liu Han.

His sheepish grin said he knew he’d been outsmarted. “Let’s see if this fellow can put the ball on the foreign devil,” he said, now using the label almost in admiration. “If I couldn’t, I’ll make a side bet he can’t, either.”

Another man set down a meaty slab of pork ribs to pay for the privilege of trying to tag Bobby Fiore. The fellow making side bets did a brisk business: now that Fiore had gone one way and then the other, what tricks could he have left?

He promptly demonstrated a new one. Instead of going right or left, he dove straight toward the bag on his belly, snaked a hand through his opponent’s legs, and grabbed the bag before the ball touched his back. “Safe!” Now a couple of people in the crowd raised the victory cry with him.

He kept running and sliding as long as men were willing to pay to try to put the ball on him. Sometimes he’d hook one way, sometimes the other, and once in a while he’d dive straight in. A couple of people did manage to guess right and tag him, but Liu Han watched the bowl fill with money and the mat with food. They were doing well.

When the sport began to seem routine rather than novel, Liu Han called, “Who wants revenge?” She tossed the ball up and down in her hand. “You can throw at the foreign devil now. He will not dodge, but if you hit him anywhere but his two hands, you win three times what you wager. Who will try?”

While she warmed up the crowd, Bobby Fiore put on the padded leather glove he’d had made along with the ball. He stood in front of the wall of a shack, then made a fist with his other hand and pounded it into the glove, as if confident no one would be able to touch him.

“From how close do we get to throw?” asked the man who’d been making side bets.

Liu Han paced off about forty feet. Bobby Fiore grinned at her. “Do you want to try?” she asked the man.

“Yes, I’ll fling at him,” he answered, dropping more money into the bowl. “I’ll put it right between his ugly round eyes, you see if I don’t.”

He tossed the ball into the air once or twice, as if to get the feel of it in his hand, and then, as he’d said, threw it right at Bobby Fiore’s head. Whack! The noise it made striking that peculiar leather glove was like a gunshot. It startled Liu Han, and startled the people in the crowd even more. A couple of them let out frightened squawks. Bobby Fiore rolled the ball back to Liu Han.

She stooped to pick it up. Before long, that wouldn’t be easy, not with her belly growing. “Who’s next?” she asked.

“Whoever it is, he can wager with me that he misses, too,” said the fellow who liked to make bets. As he couldn’t beat Bobby Fiore, he was convinced nobody could.

The next gambler paid Liu Han and let fly. Wham! That wasn’t ball hitting glove, that was ball banging against the side of the shack – the man had thrown too wildly for Bobby Fiore to catch his offering. Fiore picked up the ball and tossed it gently back to him. “You try again,” he said; he’d practiced the phrase with Liu Han.

Before the fellow could take another throw at him, the old woman who lived in the shack came out and screamed at Liu Han: “What are you doing? Are you trying to frighten me out of my wits? Stop hitting my poor house with a club. I thought a bomb landed on it.”

“No bomb, grandmother,” Liu Han said politely. “We are only playing a gambling game.” The old woman kept on screaming until Liu Han gave her three trade dollars. Then she disappeared back into her shack, obviously not caring what happened to it after that.

The fellow who hadn’t thrown straight took another shot at Bobby Fiore. This time he was on target, but Fiore caught the ball. The man squalled curses like a scalded cat.