In the Balance (4 page)

“It’s not so bad as all that, sir.” The cheerful voice at his shoulder belonged to Captain Ernst Riecke, his second-in-command.

“Ha. You heard me muttering to myself, did you?” Jäger said.

“Yes, sir. You ask me, it’s the same in tanks as it is in screwing, sir.”

Jäger raised an eyebrow. “This I have to hear.”

“Well, in both cases knowing what to do with what you’ve got counts for more than how big it is.”

The company commander snorted. Still, no doubt Riecke had a point. Even after almost a year of painful instruction at the hands of the Germans, the Bolsheviks were still in. the habit of committing their armor by dribs and drabs instead of massing it for maximum effect. That was how the dead
T-34 had come to grief: rumbling along without support, it had been set upon and destroyed by three Panzer IIIs.

Still … “Think how fine it would be to have a big one and know what to do with it.”

“It
is
enjoyable, sir,” Riecke said complacently. “Or were you talking about panzers again?”

“You’re incorrigible,” Jäger said, and then wondered if it was just that the captain was still on the sunny side of thirty. Promotion came quickly on the Russian front. Good officers led their troops forward rather than sending up orders from the rear. That meant good officers died in larger numbers, a twisted sort of natural selection that worried Jäger.

He felt every one of his own forty-three years. He’d fought in the trenches in France in 1918, in the last push toward Paris and then in the grinding retreat to the Rhine. He’d first seen tanks then, the clumsy monsters the British used, and knew at once that if he ever went to war again, he wanted them on his Side for a change. But they were forbidden to the postwar
Reichswehr
. As soon as Hitler took the gloves off and started rearming Germany, Jäger went straight into armor.

He took another couple of mouthfuls of stew, then asked, “How many panzers do we have up and running?”

“Eleven,” Riecke answered. “Maybe we’ll be able to get another one going in the morning, if we scrounge around for some fuel line.”

“Not bad,” Jäger said, as much to console himself as to reassure Riecke. On paper, his company should have had twenty-two Panzer IIIs. In fact, it had had nineteen when the Russians launched their attack. On the eastern front, getting that close to paper strength was no small accomplishment.

“The Reds can’t be in good shape, either,” Riecke said. His voice turned worried, just for a moment: “Can they?”

“We’ve bagged enough of them, the last three weeks,” Jäger said. That was true enough; a couple of hundred thousand Russians had trudged off into captivity when the Germans pinched off the opening through which they’d poured. The enemy threw away more than a thousand tanks and two thousand artillery pieces. Bolshevik losses the summer before had been on an even more colossal scale.

But before he crossed from Romania into Russia, he’d never imagined how immense the country was; how the plains seemed to stretch on and on forever; how thin a division, a corps, an army, could spread just to hold a front, let alone advance. And from those limitless plains sprang seemingly limitless streams of men and tanks. And they all fought, ferociously if without much skill. Jäger knew too well the
Wehrmacht
was anything but limitless. If every German soldier slew two Red Army men, if every panzer knocked out two T-34s or KVs, the Russians had a net gain.

Riecke lit a cigarette. The flare of the match briefly showed the dirt ground into fatigue lines he’d not had a month before. Yet somehow he still looked boyish. Jäger envied him that; at the rate he himself was going gray, he’d look like a grandfather any day now.

The captain passed him the pack. He took a cigarette, leaned closer to light it from Riecke’s. “Thanks,” he said, shielding the glowing coal with one hand: no point giving a sniper a free target. Riecke also hid his smoke.

After they’d crushed out the cigarettes under their bootheels, Riecke said suddenly,
“Are
we, going to get new models anytime soon, sir? What does your brother say?”

“Nothing he shouldn’t, which means I don’t know for certain,” Jäger answered. His brother Johann worked as an engineer for Henschel. His letters were always censored with special zeal, lest they fall into enemy hands on the long road between Germany and somewhere south of Kharkov. But brothers had ways with words that censors could not follow. After a moment, Jäger added, “It might be possible, though I thought size didn’t concern you …?”

“Oh, I’ll carry on with what we have,” the younger man said breezily.
Not that there’s any choice in the matter
, Jäger thought. Riecke went on, “Still, as you say, it would be nice to be better and bigger at the same time.”

“So it would.” Jäger splashed a little water onto his mess tin from his water bottle, pulled out some fresh spring grass to wipe it more or less clean. Then he yawned. “I’m going to try to sleep till sunup. Don’t be afraid to wake me if there’s any sign of trouble.” He’d given Riecke that order at least a hundred times. As he always did, the captain nodded.

The drone of the four Merlins made every filling in Flight Lieutenant George Bagnall’s head feel as if it were shaking loose from its tooth. The Lancaster jounced in the air as 88mm flak burst all around it, filling the night with puffs of smoke that absurdly reminded the flight engineer of dumplings.

Searchlights stabbed up from the ground, seeking to impale a bomber like a bug on a collector’s pin. The Lancaster’s belly was a flat matte black, but not black enough to make it safe if one of those skewers of light happened to catch it. Fortunately, Bagnall was too busy monitoring engine temperature and revolutions, fuel consumption, oil pressure, hydraulic lines, and all the other complex systems that had to work if the Lancaster was to keep flying, to be as frightened as he would have been as a mere passenger.

But not even the most mechanically attentive man could have stared at his dials and meters to the exclusion of the spectacle outside the thick Perspex window. Even as Bagnall watched, more flames started in
Cologne, some the almost blue-white glare of incendiaries, others spreading red blisters of ordinary fire.

Perhaps half a mile away from Bagnall’s plane and a little lower in the sky, a bomber heeled over and plunged ground-ward, one wing a sheet of flame. The flight engineer’s shiver had nothing to do with the frigid air through which his Lanc flew.

Ken Embry grunted beside him. “We may have flown a thousand bloody bombers
to
Cologne,” the pilot said. “Now we have to see how bloody many fly back
from
it.” His voice rang metallically in the intercom earphones.

“Jerry doesn’t seem very pleased with us tonight, does he?” Bagnall answered, not about to let his friend outdo him in cynicism and understatement.

Below them in the nose, Douglas Bell let out a whoop like a red Indian. “There’s the train station! Hold her steady, steady—Now!” the bomb-aimer shouted. The Lancaster shuddered again, in a new way this time, as destruction tumbled down on the German city by the Rhine.

“That’s for Coventry,” Embry said quietly. He’d lost a sister in the German raid on the English town a year and a half before.

“Coventry and then some,” Bagnall agreed. “The Germans didn’t throw nearly so many aircraft at us, and they don’t have a bomber that can touch the Lanc.” He set an affectionate gloved hand on the instrument panel in front of him.

The pilot grunted again. “They slaughter our civilians and we slaughter theirs. The same with the soldiers in the desert, the same in Russia. The Japanese are still moving against the Yanks in the Pacific, and Jerry is sinking too many ships in the Atlantic. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were losing the bloody war.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Bagnall said after a few seconds of judicious consideration. “But it does rather seem to hang in the balance, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, one side or the other will do something monumentally stupid, and that will tell the tale.”

“Good Lord, we’re doomed if that’s so,” Embry exclaimed. “Can you imagine anyone more monumentally stupid than an Englishman with his blood up?”

Bagnall scratched at his cheek below the bottom edge of his goggles; those few square inches were the only ones not covered by one or more—usually more—layers of clothing. They were also quite numb. He flogged his brain for some sort of comeback, but nothing occurred to him; this time he’d have to yield the palm of cynicism to the pilot.

He had only a few seconds in which to feel rueful. Then shouts from the rear gunner, and the top turret rang in his ears, almost deafening him:
“Enemy fighter to starboard and low! Bandit! Bandit!
Bloody
fucking bandit!” Machine guns began to hammer, although the .303 rounds were not likely to do much good.

Ken Embry heeled the Lancaster over on its side and dove away from the menace, flying his big, unwieldy aircraft as much like a fighter as he could. The frame groaned in protest. Like any sensible pilot, Embry ignored it. The German up there was more likely to kill him than he was to tear off the Lanc’s wings. He piled power onto the engines of one wing, cut it from those of the other. The Lancaster fell through the air like a stone. Bagnall clapped a hand to his mouth, as if to catch the stomach that was trying to crawl up his throat.

The shouts from the gunners rose to a crescendo. All at once drenched in sweat despite the icy air outside, Bagnall felt shells slam—one, two, three—into the wing and side of the fuselage. A twin-engine plane roared above the windscreen and vanished into the blackness, pursued by tracers from the Lanc’s guns.

“Messerschmitt-110,” Bagnall said shakily.

“Good of you to tell me,” Embry answered. “I was rather too occupied to notice.” He raised his voice. “Everyone present and accounted for?” The seven-man crew’s answers came back high and shrill, but they all came back. Embry turned to Bagnall. “And how did our humble chariot fare?”

Bagnall studied the gauges. “Everything appears—normal,” he said, surprised at how surprised he sounded. He rallied gamely: “We might have been a bit more embarrassed had Jerry chosen to shoot us up
before
we disposed of our cargo.”

“Indeed,” the pilot said. “Having disposed of it, I see no urgent reason to tarry over the scene any longer. Mr. Whyte, will you give us a course for home?”

“With pleasure, sir,” AIf Whyte answered from behind the black curtain that protected his night vision. “I thought for a moment there you were trying to fling me over the side. Fly course two-eight-three. I say again twoeight-three. That should put us on the ground back at Swinderby in about four and a half hours.”

“Or somewhere in England, at any rate,” Embry remarked; long-range navigation at night was anything but an exact science. When Whyte let out an indignant sniff, the pilot added, “Maybe I should have flung you over the side; we’d likely do just as well following a trail of bread crumbs back from Hansel and Gretel Land.”

Despite his ragging, Embry swung the bomber onto the course the navigator had given him. Bagnall kept a close eye on the instrument panel, still worried lest a line had been broken. But all the pointers stayed where they should have; the four Merlins steadily drove the Lancaster through the air at above two hundred miles an hour. The Lanc was a tough bird, especially
compared to the Blenheims in which he’d started the war. And—they’d been lucky.

He peered through the windscreen. Other Lancasters, Stirlings, and Manchesters showed up as blacker shapes against the dark sky; engine exhausts glowed red. As burning Cologne receded behind him, he felt the first easing of fear. The worst was over, and he was likely to live to fly another mission—and be terrified again.

The crew’s chatter, full of the same relief he knew himself, rang in his earphones. “Bloody good hiding we gave Jerry,” somebody said. Bagnall found himself nodding. There had been flak and there had been fighters (that Me-110 filled his mind’s eye for a moment), but he’d seen worse with both—the massive bomber force had half paralyzed Cologne’s defenses. Most of his friends—with a little luck, all his friends—would be coming home to Swinderby. He wriggled in his seat, trying to get more comfortable.
Downhill now
, he thought.

Ludmila Gorbunova bounced through the air less than a hundred meters off the ground. Her U-2 biplane seemed hardly more than a toy; any fighter from the last two years of the previous war could have hacked the
Kukuruznik
from the sky with ease. But the Wheatcutter was not just a trainer—it had proved itself as a military plane since the first days of the Great Patriotic War. Tiny and quiet, it was made for slipping undetected past German lines.

She pulled the stick back to gain more altitude. It failed to help. No flashes of artillery came from what had been first the Russian assault position, then the Russian defensive position, and finally, humiliatingly, the Russian pocket trapped inside a fascist ring.

No one had reported artillery fire from within the pocket the night before, or the night before that. Sixth Army was surely dead. But, as if unwilling to believe it, Frontal Aviation kept sending out planes in the hope the corpse might somehow miraculously revive.

Ludmila went gladly. Behind her goggles, tears stung her eyes. The offensive had begun with such promise. Even the fascist radio admitted fear that the Soviets would retake Kharkov. But then—Ludmila was vague on what had happened then, although she’d flown reconnaissance all through the campaign. The Germans managed to pinch off the salient the Soviet forces had driven into their position, and then the battle became one of annihilation.

Her gloved hand tightened on the stick as if it were a fascist invader’s neck. She’d got out of Kiev with her mother bare days before the Germans surrounded the city. Both of her brothers and her father were in the army; no letters had come from any of them for months. Sometimes, though it
was no proper thought for a Soviet woman born five years after the October Revolution, she wished she knew how to pray. A fire glowed, off in the distance. She turned the plane toward it. From all she had seen, anyone showing lights in the night had to be German. Whatever Soviet troops were still unbagged within the pocket would not dare draw attention to themselves. She brought the
Kukuruznik
down to treetop height. Time to remind the fascists they did not belong here.