Tilting The Balance (58 page)

“I have taken the liberty of analyzing the forces we have available as well as those with which the Deutsche could oppose us,” Kirel said. “I believe we are in a position to make significant gains there, and perhaps, if all goes well, to come close to knocking the Deutsche out of the fight against us.”

“That would be excellent,” Atvar said. “Forcing them into submission would improve our logistics against both Britain and the
SSSR
– and they are dangerous in their own right. Their missiles, their jet planes, their new landcruisers are all variables I would like to see removed from the equation.”

“They are dangerous in more ways than that, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said quietly. “More even than the emperor-slayers in the
SSSR
, they have industrialized murder. Eliminating them might also eliminate that idea from the planet.”

Atvar remembered the images and reports from the camp called Treblinka, and from the bigger one, just going into operation when the Race overran it, called Auschwitz. The Race had never invented any places like those. Neither had the Hallessi or the Rabotevs. So many things about Tosev 3 were unique; that was one piece of uniqueness he wished to the tip of his tailstump that the Big Uglies had not come up with.

He said, “When we are through here, the Tosevites will not be able to do that to one another. And we will have no need to do it to them, for they will be our subjects. In obedience to the will of the Emperor, this shall be done.”

Along with Atvar, Kirel cast down his eyes. “So it shall. I hope two things, Exalted Fleetlord: that the other Big Uglies working toward nuclear weapons make the same error as the Deutsche, and that the disaster permanently ended the Deutsch nuclear program. Given their viciousness, I would not want to see them of all Tosevites armed with atomic bombs.”

“Nor I,”Atvar said.

The Gestapo man said, “What happened at Haigerloch is a mystery, Colonel Jager. We are interviewing everyone at all involved with that project in an effort to learn what went wrong. And you will not deny that you were involved.” He pointed to the German Cross in gold that Jager wore.

Jager had donned the garishly ugly medal when he was summoned to Berchtesgaden, to remind people like this needle nosed snoop that the Fuhrer had given it to him with his own hands:

anyone who dared think him a traitor had better think again. Now he wished he’d left the miserable thing in its case.

He said, “I could better serve the Reich if I were returned to my combat unit. Professor Heisenberg was of the same opinion, and endorsed my application for transfer from Haigerloch months before this incident.”

“Professor Heisenberg is dead,” the Gestapo man said in a flat voice. Jager winced, nobody had told him that before. Seeing the wince, the man on the safe side of the desk nodded. “You begin to understand the magnitude of the – problem now, perhaps?”

“Perhaps I do,” Jager answered; unless he missed his guess, the interrogator had been on the point of saying something like “disaster,” but choked it back just in time. The fellow had a point. If Heisenberg was dead, the bomb program was a disaster.

“If you do understand, why are you not cooperating with us?” the Gestapo man demanded.

The brief sympathy Jager had felt for him melted away like a panzer battalion under heavy Russian attack in the middle of winter. “Do you speak German?” he demanded. “I don’t know anything. How am I supposed to tell you something I don’t know?”

The secret policeman took that in stride. Jager wondered what sort of interrogations he’d carried out, how many desperate denials, truer and untrue, he’d heard. In a way, innocence might have been worse than guilt. If you were guilty, at least you had something to reveal at last, to make things stop. If you were innocent, they’d just keep coming after you.

Because he was a Wehrmacht colonel with his share and more of tin plate on his chest, Jager didn’t face the full battery of techniques the Gestapo might have lavished on a Soviet officer, say, or a Jew. He had some notion of what those techniques were, and counted himself lucky not to make their intimate acquaintance.

“Very well, Colonel Jager,” the Gestapo major said with a sigh; maybe he regretted not being able to use such forceful persuasion on someone from his own side, or maybe he just didn’t think he was as good an interrogator without it. “You may go, although you are not yet dismissed back to your unit. We may have more questions for you as we make progress on other related investigations.”

“Thank you so much.” Jager rose from his chair He feared irony was lost on the Gestapo man, who looked to prefer the bludgeon to the rapier, but made the effort nonetheless. The bludgeon is for Russians; he thought.

Waiting in the antechamber to the interrogation room – as if the Gestapo man inside were a dentist rather than a thug – sat Professor Kurt Diebner, leafing through a Signals old enough to show only Germany’s human foes. He nodded to Jager. “So they have vacuumed you up, too, Colonel?”

“So they have.” He looked curiously at Diebner. “I would not have expected you-” He paused, unable to think of a tactful way to go on.

The physicist didn’t bother with tact. “To be among the living? Only the luck of the draw, which does make a man thoughtful. Heisenberg chose to take the pile over critical when I was away visiting my sister. Maybe not all luck, after all – he might not have wanted me around to share in his moment of fame.”

Jager suspected Diebner was right. Heisenberg had shown nothing but scorn for him at Haigerloch, though to the panzer colonel’s admittedly limited perspective, Diebner was accomplishing as much as anyone else and more than most people. Jager said, “The Lizards must have ways to keep things from going wrong when they make explosive metal.”

Diebner ran a hand through his thinning, slicked-back hair. “They have also been doing it rather longer than we have, Colonel. Haste was our undoing. You know the phrase festina lente?”

“Make haste slowly.” In his Gymnasium days, Jager had done his share of Latin.

“Just so. It’s generally good advice, but not advice we can afford at this stage of the war. We must have those bombs to fight the Lizards. The hope was that, if the reaction got out of hand, throwing a lump of cadmium metal into the heavy water of the pile would bring it back under control. This evidently proved too optimistic. And also, if I remember the engineering drawings correctly, there was no plug to drain the heavy water out of the pile and so shut down the reaction that way.

Most unfortunate.”

“Especially to everyone who was working on the pile at the time,” Jager said. “If you know all this Dr. Diebner, and you’ve told it to the authorities, why are they still questioning everyone else, too?”

“First, I suppose, to confirm what I say – and I do not know everything that led up to the disaster, because I was out of town. And also, more likely than not, to find someone on whom to lay the blame.”

That made sense to Jager; after all, he’d been trying to escape being that someone. The Wehrmacht played games with assigning responsibility for maneuvers that didn’t work, too. Another old saying crossed his mind: “Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” That wasn’t true any more; these days, the powers that be launched a paternity suit to pin a failure on somebody. The results weren’t always just, but he suspected they weren’t supposed to be.

The Gestapo major came out, probably to find out why Diebner hadn’t gone in. He scowled to discover two of his subjects talking with each other. Jager felt guilty, then angry at the secret policeman for intimidating him. He stomped out of the waiting room – and almost bumped into a big man who was just coming in. “Skorzeny!” he exclaimed.

“So they dragged you into the net, too, did they?” the scar-faced SS colonel said. “They’re going to rake me over the coals even though, as far as I know, I’ve never been within a hundred kilometers of the little pissant town where the screw-up happened. Some major’s supposed to grill me in five minutes.”

“He’s running late,” Jager, said. “He just got done with me and started in on one of the physicists. Want to go someplace and drink some schnapps? Nothing much else to do around here.”

idea I’ve heard since they hauled me back here, by God! Let’s go – even if the schnapps they’re making these days tastes like it’s cooked from potato peelings, it’ll put fire in your belly. And I was hoping I’d run into you, as a matter of fact. I’m working on a scheme where you just might fit in very nicely.”

“Really?” Jager raised an eyebrow. “How generous of the SS to look kindly on a poor but honest Wehrmacht man-”

“Oh, can the shit,” Skorzeny said. “You happen to know things that would be useful to me. Now let’s go get those drinks you were talking about. After I ply you with liquor, I’ll try seducing you.” He leered at Jager.

“Ahh, you only want me for my body,” the panzer man said.

“No, it’s your mind I crave,” Skorzeny, insisted.

Laughing, the two men found a tavern down the street from Gestapo headquarters. The fellow behind the bar wore uniform, as did just about everyone in Berchtesgaden these days. “Even the whores here are all kitted out with field-gray panties,” Skorzeny grumbled as he and Jager took a table in the dimly lit cave. He raised his snifter in salute, knocked back his schnapps, and made a horrible face. “God, that’s vile.”

Jager also took a healthy nip. “It is, isn’t it?” But warmth did spread out from his belly. “It’s got the old antifreeze in it, though, no doubt about that.” He leaned forward. “Before you jump on me, I’m going to pick your brain: what sort of goodies are they fishing out of that tank you stole? I want to pretend I’m still a panzer man, you see, not a physicist or a bandit like you.”

Skorzeny chuckled. “Flattery gets you nowhere. But I’ll talk – why the hell not? Half of it I don’t understand. Half of it nobody understands, which is part of the problem: the Lizards build machines that are smarter than the people we have trying to figure out what they do. But there’ll be new ammunition coming down the line by and by, and new armor, too – layers of steel and ceramic bonded together the devil’s uncle only knows how.”

“You served on the Russian front, all right,” Jager said. “New ammunition, new armor – that’s not bad. One day I may even get to use them. Probably not one day soon, though, eh?” Skorzeny did not deny it. Jager sighed, finished his shot, went back to the bar for another round, and returned to the table Skorzeny pounced on the fresh drink like a tiger. Jager sat down, then asked, “So what is this scheme you have that involves me?”

“Ah, that. You were going to be an archaeologist before the first war sucked you into the Army, right?”

“You’ve been poking through my records,” Jager said without much malice. He drank more schnapps. It didn’t seem so bad now – maybe the first shot had stunned his taste buds. “What the devil does archaeology have to do with the price of potatoes?”

“You know the Lizards have Italy,” Skorzeny said. “They’re not as happy there as they used to be, and the Italians aren’t so happy with them, either. I had a little something to do with that, getting Mussolini out of the old castle where they’d tucked him away for safekeeping.” He looked smug. He’d earned the right, too.

“You’re planning to go down there again, and you want me along?” the panzer colonel asked. “I’d stick out like a sore thumb – not just my looks, mind you, but I don’t speak much Italian.”

But Skorzeny shook his massive head. “Not Italy. The Lizards are messing about on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, over in Croatia. I have trouble stomaching Ante Pavelic, but he’s an ally, and we don’t want the Lizards getting a toehold over there.

You follow so far?”

“The strategy, yes.” Jager didn’t say that he marveled at an SS man’s having trouble stomaching anything. Word had trickled through the Wehrmacht that the Croat allies, puppets, whatever you wanted to call them, took their fascism – to say nothing of their blood feuds – very seriously indeed. Maybe Skorzeny s admission was proof of that Jager went on, “I still don’t see what it has to do with me, though.”

Skorzeny looked like a fisherman trying out a new lure. “Suppose I were to tell you – and I can, because it’s true – the main Lizard base in Croatia is just outside Split. What would that mean to you?”

“Diocletian’s palace,” Jager answered without a moment’s hesitation. “I even visited there once, on holiday eight or ten years ago. Hell of an impressive building even after better than sixteen hundred years.”

I know you visited, the report you wrote probably went into the operational planning for Operation Strafgericht Strafgericht indeed; we punished the Yugoslavs properly for ducking out of their alliance with us. But that’s by the way. What counts is that you know the area, and not just from that visit but from study as well. That’s why I say you could be very useful to me.”

“You’re not planning on blowing up the palace, are you?” Jager asked with sudden anxiety Monuments suffered in wartime; that couldn’t be helped. He’d seen enough Russian churches in flames during Barbarossa, but a Russian church didn’t carry the same weight for him as a Roman Emperor’s palace.

“I will if I have to,” Skorzeny said. “I understand what you’re saying, Jager, but if you’re going to let that kind of attitude hold you back, then I’ve made a mistake and you’re the wrong fellow for the job.”

“I may be anyhow. I’ve got a regiment waiting for me south of Belfort, remember.”

“You’re a good panzer man, Jager, but you’re not a genius panzer man,” Skorzeny said. “The regiment will do well enough under someone else. For me, though, your special knowledge would truly come in handy. Do I tempt you, or not?”

Jager rubbed his chin. He had no doubt Skorzeny could cut through the chain of command and get him reassigned: he’d pulled off enough coups for the brass to listen to him. The question was, did he want to go on fighting the same old war himself or try something new?