In the Balance (71 page)

To the south, the gray stone pile of Dover Castle concealed some of those stars from view. The Saxons had had a fort there. When Louis VIII failed to take the place in 1216, it likely staved off a French invasion of England. Henry VIII had added to it, and more brickwork had gone up against another feared French invader, Napoleon. Later in the nineteenth century, a turret with a sixteen-inch gun was added to ward the port from attack by sea.

But the turret designers never foresaw attack by air. Goldfarb’s own radar masts had done more to defend Dover, to defend all of England, from Hitler’s wrath than all the stone and brickwork put together. Against the Lizards, even the wizardry of radar seemed, if not futile, then surely inadequate.

A little red dot, fainter than a summer glowworm, came floating down St James Street toward him. His hand twitched; he hadn’t had a cigarette in it for a long time. With imports even of food cut first by German submarines and then by Lizard aircraft, tobacco had all but disappeared.

During the Depression, people had scooped cigarette butts out of the gutter to smoke. Goldfarb was never reduced to that, though the scorn he’d felt the first time he saw it had dwindled first to pity and then to acceptance. But that scavenging sprang from a shortage of money, not a shortage of cigarettes.

Now Goldfarb called to whoever hid behind that seductively burning coal, “Here, friend, have you got another fag you can sell me?”

The smoker stopped. The lit end of the cigarette glowed brighter for a moment, then moved as its owner shifted it to the side of his mouth. “Sorry, chum, I’m down to my last three, and I won’t sell ’em: I couldn’t use the money on anything I’d sooner have. But you can take a drag off this one, if you like.”

Goldfarb hesitated; in a way, that struck him as worse than nipping up fag-ends. But the unseen smoker sounded kindly. Even if he wouldn’t give up what he had, he’d share a little. “Thanks,” Goldfarb said, and stepped quickly forward.

He held the single lungful of smoke as long as he could, let it out with real regret. The owner of the cigarette puffed again. In the faint crimson glow, his face was rapt with pleasure. “Bloody war,” he said on the exhale.

“Too right,” Goldfarb said. He coughed; however much he liked it, his body was out of the habit of smoking. “I wonder what we’ll run short of next. Tea, maybe.”

“There’s a horrible thought. You’re likely right, though. Don’t raise a lot of bloody tea in the fields of Kent, eh?”

“No,” Goldfarb said morosely. He wondered what he’d do when his morning cuppa ran out. He’d do
without
, was what he’d do. “What did we do before there was tea?”

“Drank beer, I expect.” The smoker carefully extinguished the cigarette. “That’s what I’m about to do now. Don’t want to go in there with this lit, though. I’ve heard of men knocked over the head for a pipe’s ’orth of tobacco, and I don’t fancy it happening to me.”

“Clever,” Goldfarb said, nodding. “There’s enough smoke inside already that no one will smell it on you.”

“My very thought.” Now the other man was just a voice in the darkness. He went on, “I might want to try and get close to that redheaded barmaid they have here, too—what’s her name?”

“Sylvia,” Goldfarb said dully.

“Sylvia, that’s right. Have you seen her?” Without waiting for an answer, the smoker added, “I’d spend a cigarette on
her
, I would.” He found the door to the White Horse Inn by ear, slipped inside.

Goldfarb stood out in the cold a few seconds longer, then started the long hike back to his quarters. He didn’t think Sylvia could be bought for a fag, but what did it matter? She wasn’t his now, and she’d never really been his. Slaking your lust was all very well—was, when you got down to it, better than all very well—but you had to be sensible about it. If that was all you were doing with a woman, stopping oughtn’t to be the end of the world.

Far away, like distant screams, he heard the shriek of Lizard aircraft engines. His shiver had nothing to do with the cold. He wondered who was up in the night sky with a balky radar, and whether the chap would make it back to the ground again.

Antiaircraft guns began their almost surely futile pounding. Goldfarb shivered again. Losing Sylvia was not the end of the world. Off in the distance, he could hear the sound the end of the world made.

16

Off in the distance, antiaircraft guns yammered Heinrich Jäger listened enviously. If the
Wehrmacht
had had guns like those, Red Air Force planes would have had a thin time of it indeed. Going up against the Lizards, the Red Air Force still had a thin time of it.

But, as the stutter of AA fire proved, the Russians kept coming. Jäger had found out about that, too, in the eleven months before the Lizards’ invasion shoved the war between National Socialism and Communism onto the back burner. Now the Lizards were learing about Soviet stubbornness. Jäger hoped they enjoyed their education as much as he’d liked his.

Maybe the Russians hadn’t lied when they told him his horse had served as a cavalryman’s mount. It only twitched its ears at the distant gunfire. Of course, how it would react if he had to shoot from its back was anyone’s guess. With luck, he wouldn’t have to find out.

“The sons of whores should have put me in a plane,” he said aloud, as much to hear the sound of his own voice in this snowy wilderness as for any other reason. The horse snorted. It didn’t understand German; they’d given him a list of Russian commands for it. But it seemed glad to be reminded it was carrying a human. If ever there was a country for wolves, this was it.

Jäger slapped his lead-lined saddlebags with a gloved hand. They held the
Reich’s
fair share of the metal the partisan raid had stolen from the Lizards outside Kiev. And here he was, alone on horseback, carrying it to Germany.

“They want me to fail,” he said. The horse snorted again. He patted its neck. “They really do.”

When he and foul-mouthed Max made contact with a Red Army unit still in the direct chain of command from Moscow, the Soviets had been effusive in their praise and scrupulously exact in sharing out the precious booty Germans and Russians had combined to seize. Only afterward did
things get difficult.

No, he’d been told, unfortunately air transportation wasn’t available. Yes, the Red Army colonel understood his urgent need to return to Germany. But did
he
understand how likely he was to be shot down before he got there? No, the colonel could not in good conscience let him risk his life by flying.

Now Jäger snorted, louder than the horse had. “When a Russian colonel says he won’t risk a life, you know something’s screwy somewhere.” Against the Germans in the last war and this one, the Russian way of putting out a fire was to throw bodies on it till it smothered.

With knees, reins, and voice, Jäger urged the horse forward. He hadn’t done much riding since before World War I broke out, but he still remembered the basics. It was a very different business from traveling by panzer. Inside that heavy steel turret, you felt cut off from the world and immune to whatever it might do to you … unless it decided to hit you with a shell, of course.

But on horseback, you met the world face to face. At the moment, the world was snowing in Jäger’s face. The Russians had given him a fur hat, a padded jacket, and felt boots, so he wasn’t chilly. Now that he was inside some of it, he discovered for himself how good Russian cold-weather gear really was. No wonder the Ivans had given the
Wehrmacht
such grief the winter before.

He leaned down, spoke confidentially into the horse’s ear. “If anyone ever asks the Kremlin about this, they’ll be able to say they gave me all the help they thought they could, but I just didn’t make it back to Germany with this stuff.” He slapped a saddlebag again. “But do you know what, Russian horse? I’m going to fool them. I’m going to get there whether they want me to or not. And if they don’t like it, they can go piss themselves for all I care.”

The horse, of course, had no idea what he was talking about. Not only was it a dumb animal, it was a Russian dumb animal. Till recently, it had been either pulling a plow for the enemy or carrying a Red Army cavalryman into action. But for the time being, its fate and his were bound together.

The snow muffled the animal’s hoolbeats. Its body heat warmed the insides of his thighs and his rear end. His Panzer III, he remembered fondly, had had a heater that would warm all of him. On the other hand, he liked the horse’s grassy smell better than the oil, petrol, cordite reek of the panzer.

“Yes, that’s how the Kremlin wants it, horse,” he said. “They needed German help to get this metal, but do they want the
Reich
to have the benefit of it? Not on your life they don’t. They want to be the only ones who
can make bombs like this, yes they do. They will use one on the Lizards, and if they beat the Lizards, wouldn’t it be nice for them if they could hold one over Germany’s head, too? But I already told you, horse, I don’t intend to let that happen.”

He peered ahead through the spattering snow. Unfortunately, what he intended to let happen and what would in fact happen were not necessarily one and the same. He didn’t think he was inside what had been Soviet territory before the war any more, but rather in what was formerly Polish-held Ruthernia. Much of that land, after getting overrun first by the Russians and then by the Germans, was now in the Lizards’ hands.

And here, as perhaps nowhere else on earth, the Lizards had their willing puppets—their quislings, the British would have called them, Jäger thought with wry amusement. In Moscow, he’d listened to Moishe Russie on the shortwave a couple of times. He’d judged the man a hysteric, a liar, and a traitor to mankind.

Now … now he was not so sure. Every time he tried to laugh off what the Jew said as just another atrocity story, he kept remembering the scar on the side of Max’s neck and the Jewish partisan’s obscenely embellished tale of slaughter and horror at Babi Yar. Much as he wanted to, he didn’t think Max lied. And if Max’s horror was true, then Moishe Russie’s might be, also.

Riding a horse alone through winter gave you a chance to think, maybe more of a chance than you really wanted. What
had
the
Reich
been doing behind the lines of the territory it held? Jäger was a field-grade officer, not a policymaker. But German officers were supposed to think for themselves, not blindly follow superiors’ orders like their Soviet or Lizard counterparts. He could not for the life of him see how massacring Jews moved the war effort forward even a centimeter.

Massacring Jews might in fact push the war effort back It had driven the Polish Jews who survived into the Lizards’ arms. A lot of those Jews lay between Jäger and the
Reich
. If they spotted him and let their new masters know a German was loose on their territory … if they did that, the Russians’ scheme would be realized in full.

“Stupid,” he muttered. What did Jews do in battle against the
Reich
except get in the way like any other civilians?

He rode by a deserted farmhouse, shook his head. So much devastation. How long would people take to recover from it? Even more to the point, on what terms would they recover? Would they be their own masters, or slaves to the Lizards for untold centuries to come? Jäger found no sure answer. Humanity had discovered ways to hurt the Lizards, but not to beat them, not yet. Maybe—he hoped—he held a way to beat them in his saddlebags.

The road he was following (actually, it was more of a track) took him
into a stand of pale-barked birches a few hundred meters past the farmhouse. He unslung his rifle, set it across his knees. Unpleasant things and even more unpleasant people could lurk among trees. He showed his teeth in a not-quite-humorless grin. A few weeks before, he’d been one of those unpleasant people, or so the Lizards. would have said.

A man stepped out from behind a tree trunk. Like Jäger, he wore a mixture of Russian and German winter gear; also like Jäger, he carried a rifle. He didn’t aim it at the German, but he looked ready to use it. He said something in Polish. Jäger didn’t know any Polish. He weighed his chances as he reined in. If he could get in a quick, sure shot—no guarantee while on horseback—then set spurs to his mount, he had a chance at getting away from this … bandit?