Tilting The Balance (73 page)

Stalin paced back and forth. He did not put down the incipient rebellion at once, which was unusual. Maybe. Molotov thought, he has doubts, too. Stalin nodded to Zhukov. “How say you, Georgi Konstantinovich?”

Zhukov and Stalin were the same sort of military team as Molotov and Stalin were a political team: Stalin the guiding will, the other man the instrument that shaped the will to practical ends.

Zhukov licked his lips; plainly he was of two minds, too. At last he said, “Comrade General Secretary, if we do not use this weapon, I see nothing that will keep us from being overrun. We may be able to continue partisan warfare against the Lizards, but not much more. How can what they do to us after we use the weapon be worse than what they will do to us if we do not use it?”

“Have you seen the pictures of Berlin?” Molotov demanded. By then, he was certain he had raised Stalin’s wrath, but he was too upset even to be frightened. That was most unusual; he would have to examine the feeling later. No time now.

Zhukov nodded. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I have. They are terrible. But have you seen pictures of Kiev after first the fascists and then the Lizards went through it? They are just as bad. This bomb is a more efficient means of destruction, but destruction will take place with it or without it.”

As always, Molotov held his features immobile.

Behind that unsmiling mask, his heart sank. It sank still further when General Koniev asked, “How do we deliver this bomb? Can we drop it from an airplane? If we can do that, can we have some hope of putting an airplane where we most need it without the Lizards’ shooting it down?”

“Before we examine ways and means, we still need to consider whether we should take this course.” Molotov’s impassive voice concealed the desperation that grew inside him Stalin pretended he had not spoken and answered Koniev instead: “Comrade, the bomb is too bulky to fit into any of our bombers, and, as you say, the Lizards shoot them down too readily to make them a good way to deliver it anyhow. But planes are for taking bombs to an enemy who is far away if the enemy is instead coming to you-” He let the sentence hang.

Molotov scratched his head, not sure where Stalin was going with that. It must have made sense to Zhukov and Koniev though they both chuckled. Zhukov finished the phrase for Stalin:” – you put the bomb where he will be and wait.”

“Just so,” Stalin said happily. In fact, we shall encourage him to concentrate in the sector where we shall place the bomb to make sure we do him as much damage as we can. Now it made sense to Molotov too, but it didn’t t make him any happier.

Koniev said “Two risks here. The first is that the weapon will be discovered; past maskirovka, I don’t see what we can do about that. The second is that a weapon left behind won’t go off when we want it to. How do we make sure that does not happen?”

“We have multiple devices to set it off,” Stalin answered. “One is by radio signal, one is with a battery, and one is with a clockwork manufactured by German prisoners in our employ.” He spoke utterly without irony; Molotov had no doubt those prisoners were no longer among the living. “They did not know to what device the clockwork would be affixed, of course. But it has been tested repeatedly; it is most reliable.”

“Just as well, considering the use to which it will be put.” But Koniev nodded. “You are right, Comrade General Secretary: however vile the fascists may be, they make excellent mechanical devices. This clockwork or one of the other means you noted should definitely be able to set off the bomb at a time of our choosing.”

“So the engineers and scientists have assured me,” Stalin said with a slight purr in his voice that told what would happen if the engineers and scientists were wrong. Molotov would not have wanted to be in the shoes of the men who labored on that kolkhoz outside of Moscow.

He pushed forward between Zhukov and Koniev. Both officers looked at him in surprise; he was usually a good deal less assertive at military conferences, which he attended mostly so he would know how developments on the battlefield affected the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. He studied the map. Red units represented Soviet forces, green the Lizards, and occasional pockets of blue German troops that still fought on in the land they had invaded almost two years before.

Even to his unsoldierly eye, the situation looked grim. The makeshift line patched together between Sukhinichi and Kaluga wasn’t going to hold. He could see that already; not enough Red Army forces were in place to hold back the advancing Lizard armor. And once the line was pierced, it was fall back or get cut off from your comrades and surrounded. Nazi panzers had done that to Soviet troops again and again in the desperate summer and fall of 1941.

Nonetheless, he stabbed a hesitant finger out toward Kaluga. “Cannot we stop them here?” he asked. “Any effort, it seems to me, would be better than using the explosive metal bomb and facing whatever retaliation the Lizards may choose to inflict.”

“Even Kaluga is too close to Moscow, far too close,” Stalin said. “From airstrips behind the city, they can smash us to pieces.” But he glanced at Zhukov before he went on, “If they don’t come past Kaluga, we shall not deploy the bomb.”

“That is an excellent decision, losef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said fulsomely. Zhukov and Koniev both nodded. Molotov felt sweat under the armpits of his white cotton shirt. He wondered if the Tsar’s courtiers had had to tread so carefully in guiding their sovereign toward a sensible course. He doubted it – not since the days of Peter the Great, anyhow, or maybe Ivan the Terrible.

When Stalin spoke again, his voice held some of the steel that had given losef Dzhugashvili his revolutionary sobriquet: “If the Lizards advance past Kaluga, however, the bomb will be used against them.”

Molotov looked to Koniev and Zhukov for support.

He found none. The marshal and the general were both nodding, perhaps without enthusiasm but. without hesitation, either. Molotov made his own head go up and down. Useless to argue with Stalin, he told himself Useless to antagonize him. He kept on nodding, though in his heart winter’s chill had returned to oust the bright spring day.

Heinrich Jager glanced up at the, sun before he raised the binoculars to his eyes. In the afternoon, the Lizards down in Split might have been able to spot reflections from the lenses. The hill-fortress of Klis in which he sheltered sat only a few kilometers inland from the city on the Adriatic coast.

The Zeiss optics brought Split leaping almost within arm’s length. Sixteen hundred years after it was built, Diocletian’s palace still dominated Jager’s view of the city. Fortress is a better word he thought. Actually, it was in essence a Roman legionary camp transformed into stone: a rough rectangle with sides of 150 to 200 meters, each one pierced by a single, central gate. Three of the four towers at the corners of the rectangle were still standing.

Jager lowered the binoculars. “Not a place I’d care to try attacking, even nowadays, without heavy artillery on my side,” he said.

Beside him, Otto Skorzeny grunted. “I can see why you, went into armor, Jager: you have no head for the subtleties.”

“What’s that Hungarian curse? – a horse’s cock up your arse?” Jager said. Both men laughed. Jager peered through the binoculars again. Even they couldn’t make the Lizard sentries on the walls of the palace and in positions around it seem much more than little moving antlike specks. They were well sited, no doubt about that; in set-piece situations, the Lizards were quite competent.

Skorzeny chuckled again. “I wonder if our scaly friends down there know that we have better plans of their strongpoint than they do.”

“They wouldn’t have picked it if they did,” Jager answered. The plans hadn’t come out of the archives of the German General Staff, but from the Zeitschrift fiir sudosteuropaischen Archaologie. Skorzeny found that vastly amusing, and called Jager “Herr Doktor Professor”every chance he got. But even Skorzeny had to admit that the quality of the plans couldn’t have been better had military engineers drafted them.

“I think you’re right,” the SS man said. “To them it’s just the strongest building in town, so naturally it’s where they moved in.”

“Yes.” Jager wondered if the Lizards had a concept of archaeology. Word filtering out of intelligence said they were conservative by nature (which he’d already discovered from fighting as a going concern since the days when people were barbarians if not downright (and barely upright) savages. That made Jager think they wouldn’t reckon any building a mere millennium and a half old worth studying as a monument of antiquity.

“So, what are you, going to do about getting those cursed creatures out of there?” Marko Petrovic asked in fluent if accented German. The Croatian captain’s khaki uniform contrasted with the field gray the Germans wore. Even though Petrovic wore a uniform, being around him made Jager nervous – he seemed more bandit chief than officer. His thick black beard only added to the effect. It did not, however, completely conceal facial scars that made the one seaming Skorzeny’s cheek a mere scratch by comparison.

Skorzeny turned to the Croat and said, “Patience, my friend. We want to do the job properly, not just quickly.”

Petrovic scowled. His beard and scars made that scowl fearsome, but the look in his eye chilled Jager more. To Petrovic, it wasn’t just a military problem; he took it personally. That would make him a bold fighter, but a heedless one: Jager performed the evaluation as automatically as he breathed.

“What’s the complication?” the Croat demanded. “We’re in easy shelling range of the place now. We move in some artillery, open up, and-”

The idea of shelling a building that had stood since the start of the fourth century sickened Jager, but that wasn’t why he shook his head. “Artillery wouldn’t root them all out, Captain, and it would give them an excuse to expand their perimeter to take in these hills. They’re staying in town; I’d just as soon keep them down there as long as they’re willing to sit quietly.”

“You would not be bleating ‘patience’ if Split were a town in the Reich,” Petrovic said.

He had a point; Hitler waxed apoplectic over German territory lost. Jager was not about to admit that, though. He said, “We have a chance to drive them out, not just annoy them. I aim to make certain we don’t waste it.”

Petrovic glowered – like a lot of the, locals, he had a face that was made for glowering:, long and bony, with heavy eyebrows and deep set eyes – but subsided. Skorzeny swatted him on the back and said, “Don’t you worry. We’ll fix those miserable creatures for you.” He, sounded breezy and altogether confident.

If he convinced Petrovic, the Croat captain did a good job of hiding it. He said, “You Germans think you can do everything. You’d better be right this time, or-” He didn’t say or what, but walked off shaking his head.

Jager was glad he’d gone. “Some of these Croats are scary bastards,” he said in a low voice. Skorzeny nodded, and anyone who worried him enough for him to admit it was a very rugged customer indeed. Jager went on, “We’d better get the Lizards out of there, because if we don’t, Ante Pavelic and the Ustashi will be just as happy in bed with them as with us, as long as the Lizards let them go on killing Serbs and Jews and Bosnians and-”

“ – all their other neighbors,” Skorzeny finished for him. He didn’t acknowledge that the Germans had done the same thing on a bigger scale all through the east. He couldn’t have been ignorant of that; he just deliberately didn’t think about it. Jager had seen that with other German officers. He’d been the same way himself, until he saw too much for him to ignore. To him, a lot of his colleagues seemed willfully blind.

Skorzeny pulled a flask off his belt, unstoppered it, took a healthy belt, and passed it to Jager. It. was vodka, made from potatoes that had died happy. Jager drank, too. “Zhiveli,” he said, one of the few words of Serbo-Croatian he’d picked up.

Skorzeny laughed. “That probably means something like ‘here’s hoping your sheep is a virgin,’” he said, which made Jager cough and choke. The SS man had another swig, then stowed the flask again. He glanced around with a skilled imitation of casual uninterest to make sure nobody but Jager was in earshot, then murmured, “I picked up something interesting n town yesterday.”

“Ah?” Jagersaid.

The SS colonel nodded, “you’remember when I went into Besangon, I had the devil’s own time finding any Lizards to do business with, because one of their high mucky-mucks had gone through there and cleaned out a whole raft of the chaps who’d gotten themselves hooked on ginger?”

“I remember your saying so, yes,” Jager answered. “It didn’t seem to stop you.” He also remembered his own amazement and then awe as the bulky Skorzeny writhed his way out of a Lizard panzer several sizes too small for him.

“That’s my job, not getting stopped,” Skorzeny said with a mug grin that twisted the scar on his cheek. “Turns out the name of that mucky-muck was Drefsab, or something like that. Half the Lizards in Besangon thought he was wonderful for doing such a good job of clearing out the ginger lickers; the other half hated him for doing such a good job.”

“What about it?” Jager said, then paused. “Wait a minute, let me guess – This Dref-whoever is down there in Split now?”

“You’re clever, you know that?” The SS man eyed him half in annoyance at having his surprise spoiled, half in admiration.

“I wasn’t stupid to bring you along here, either. That’s it exactly, Jager the very same Lizard.”

“Coincidence?”

“Anything is possible.” Skorzeny’s tone said he didn’t believe it for a minute. “But by what he did back in France, he’s got to be one of their top troubleshooters. And there aren’t any ginger lickers down there. The locals would be selling to them if there were, and the ten kilos I brought with me is gathering dust here in Klis. And if it’s not about ginger, what’s he doing down there?”

“Dickering with the Croats?”

Skorzeny rubbed his chin. “That makes more sense than anything I’ve come up with. The Lizards need to do some dickering, not just to get their toehold here but also because the Italians were occupying Split until they surrendered to the Lizards. Then the Croats threw ‘em out. The scaly boys might be making a deal for Italy as well as for themselves. But it’s like a song that’s a little out of tune – it doesn’t seem quite right to me somehow.”