Striking the Balance (34 page)

“That’s good,” Anton Mikhailov said admiringly after yet another guard went off scratching his head at Nussboym’ s replies. “Keep it up and after a while they’ll quit bothering you because they’ll figure they won’t be able to get any sense out of you anyway.”

“Sense?” Nussboym rolled his eyes. “If you crazy Russians wanted sense, you never would have started these camps in the first place.”

“You think so, do you?” the other
zek
answered. “Try building socialism without the coal they get from the camps, and the timber, without the railroads
zeks
build and without the canals we dig. Why, without camps, the whole damn country would fall apart.” He sounded as if he took a perverse pride in being part of such a vital and socially signflicant enterprise.

“Maybe it should fall apart, then,” Nussboym said. “These NKVD bastards work everybody the way the Nazis work Jews. I’ve seen both now, and there isn’t much to choose between them.” He thought a moment. “No, I take that back. These are just labor camps. You don’t have the kind of assembly-line murder the Nazis had started up just before the Lizards got there.”

“Why murder a man when you can work him to death?” Mikhailov asked. “It’s—what’s the word I want?—it’s inefficient, that’s what it is.”

“This—what we do here—you call this efficient?” Nussboym exclaimed. “You could train chimpanzees to do this.”

The Russian thief shook his head. “Chimpanzees would fall over dead, Nussboym. They couldn’t make ’em stand it. Their hearts would break and they’d die. They call ’em dumb animals, but they’re smart enough to know when things are hopeless—and that’s more than you can say about people.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Nussboym said. “Look what they’ve got us doing now, these barracks we’re making.”

“Don’t you bitch about this work,” Mikhailov said. “Rudzutak was damn lucky to get it for our gang; it’s a hell of a lot easier than going out to the forest and chopping down trees in the snow. This way you go back to your bunk half dead, not all the way.”

“I’m not arguing about that,” Nussboym said impatiently. Sometimes he wondered if he was a one-eyed man in the country of the blind. “Have you paid any attention to what we’re building, though?”

Mikhailov looked around and shrugged. “It’s a barracks. It’s going up according to plan. The guards haven’t said boo. As long as they’re happy, I don’t care. If they wanted me to make herring boats, I wouldn’t complain about that, either. I’d make herring boats.”

Nussboym threw down his hammer in exasperation. “Would you make herring boats that didn’t hold herring?”

“Careful with that,” his partner warned. “You break a tool and the guards will give you a stomping whether they can talk to you or not. They figure everybody understands a boot in the ribs, and they’re mostly right. Would I make herring boats that didn’t hold herring? Sure. If that’s what they told me to do. You think I’m the one to tell ’em they’re wrong? Do I look crazy?”

That sort of keep-your-head-down-and-do-what-you’re-told attitude had existed in the Lodz ghetto. It didn’t just exist in the
gulags,
it dominated. Nussboym felt like yelling, “But the Emperor has no clothes!” Instead, he picked up the hammer and drove a couple of nails into the frame of the bunk bed on which he and Mikhailov were working. He hit the nails as hard as he could, trying to relieve some of his frustration that way.

It didn’t work. As he reached down into the bucket for another nail, he asked, “How would you like to sleep in these bunks we’re making?”

“I don’t like sleeping in the bunks we’ve got now,” Mikhailov answered. “Give me a broad who’ll say yes, though, and I don’t care where you put me. I’ll manage fine, thank you very much.” He drove a nail himself.

“A broad?” Nussboym hesitated. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

His fellow
zek
stared at him in pity. “Then you’re a fool, aren’t you? They go and run up these new barracks. They put enough barbed wire between them and the ones we sleep in to keep the Nazis from crossing the border, and I hear we’re supposed to get a trainload of ‘special prisoners’ before long. Do I have to draw you a picture, chum?”

“I hadn’t heard about the special prisoners coming in,” Nussboym said. He knew a lot of the gossip on the camp grapevine went right by him because his Russian really wasn’t very good.

“Well, they are,” Mikhailov said. “We’ll be lucky even to catch a glimpse of ’em. The guards, though, they’ll get fucked and sucked till they can’t stand up straight, the stinking sons of bitches. The cooks, too, and the clerks—anybody with pull. You’re just a regular
zek,
though, forget it.”

Nussboym hadn’t thought about women since he ended up in Soviet hands. No, that wasn’t true: he hadn’t thought about them in any concrete way, simply because he figured he wouldn’t see any for a long, long time. Now—

Now he said, “Even for women, these bunks are awfully small and awfully close together.”

“So the guards climb in and do it sideways instead of on top,” Mikhailov said. “So what? It doesn’t matter to them, they don’t care what the broads think, and you’re a stubborn kike, you know that?”

“I know that,” Nussboym said; by the other’s tone, it was almost a compliment. “All right, we’ll get it done the way they tell us to. And if there are women here, we don’t have to admit we made this stuff for them.”

“Now you’re talking,” the other
zek
said.

The work gang met its norms for the day, which meant it got fed—not extravagantly, but almost enough to keep body and soul together. After his bread and soup, Nussboym stopped worrying about his belly for a little while. It had enough in it that it was no longer sounding an internal air-raid siren. He knew that klaxon would start up again all too soon, but had learned in Lodz to cherish these brief moments of satiety.

A lot of the other
zeks
had that same feeling. They sat around on their bunks, waiting for the order to blow out the lamps. When that came, they would fall at once into a deep, exhausted sleep. Meanwhile, they gossiped or read the propaganda sheets the camp muckymucks sometimes passed out (those generated plenty of new gossip, most of it sardonic or ribald) or repaired trousers and jackets, their heads bent close to the work so they could see what they were doing in the dim light.

Somewhere off in the distance, a train whistle howled, low and mournful. Nussboym barely noticed it. A few minutes later, it came again, this time unmistakably closer.

Anton Mikhailov sprang to his feet. Everybody stared at this unwonted display of energy. “The special prisoners!” the
zek
exclaimed.

Instantly, the barracks were in an uproar. Many of the prisoners hadn’t seen a woman in years, let alone been close to one. The odds that they would be close to one now were slim. The barest possibility, though, was plenty to remind them they were men.

Going outside between supper and lights-out wasn’t forbidden, though the weather was still chilly enough that it had been an uncommon practice. Now dozens of
zeks
trooped out of the barracks, Nussboym among them. The other buildings were emptying, too. Guards yelled, trying to keep the prisoners in some kind of order.

They had little luck. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the men made a beeline for the wire that separated their encampment from the new one. The barracks there were only half done, as no one knew better than Nussboym, but that, from everything he’d heard, was a typical piece of Soviet inefficiency.

“Look!” someone said with a reverent sigh. “They’ve put up a canopy to keep the poor darlings from getting the sun on their faces.”

“And then they have them come in at night,” somebody else added. “If that isn’t the
gulag,
I don’t know what is.”

The train pulled to a stop a few minutes later, iron wheels screaming as they slid along the track. NKVD men with submachine guns and lanterns hurried up to the Stolypin cars that had carried the prisoners. When the doors opened, the first people off the cars were more guards.

“The hell with them,” Mikhailov said. “We don’t want to see their ugly mugs. We know all about what those bastards look like. Where are the broads?”

The way the guards were shouting and screaming at the prisoners to come out and hurry up about it set the
zeks
laughing fit to burst among themselves. “Better be careful, dears, or they’ll send you to the front, and then you’ll really be sorry,” someone called in shrill falsetto.

A head appeared at the doorway to one of the Stolypin cars. The prisoners’ breath went out in one long, anticipatory sigh. Then what was left of it went out again, this time in dozens of gasps of astonishment. A Lizard jumped out of the car and skittered toward the barracks, then another and another and another.

David Nussboym stared at them as avidly as if they were women. He spoke their language. He wondered if anyone else in the whole camp did.

IX

Mutt Daniels eyed the boat with something less than enthusiasm. “Damn,” he said feelingly. “When they said they weren’t shippin’ us back to Chicago from Elgin, I reckoned they couldn’t do no worse to us than what we seen there. Shows how blame much I know, don’t it?”

“You got that right, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Herman Muldoon said. “This whole mission, the way they talk about it, it’s a ‘deeply regret’ telegram just waitin’ to happen. Or it would be, I mean. If they still bothered sending those telegrams any more.”

“That will be enough of that, gentlemen,” Captain Stan Szymanski said. “They tapped us on the shoulder for this job, and we are going to do it.”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt said. The unspoken corollary to Szymanski’s comment was,
or die trying,
which struck Mutt as likely. If it struck Szymanski as likely, too, he didn’t let on. Maybe he was a good actor; that was part of being a good officer, same as it was for being a good manager. Or maybe Szymanski didn’t really believe, not down deep, that his own personal private self could ever stop existing. If Szymanski was thirty yet, Mutt figured he was the King of England.

Mutt was getting close to sixty. The possibility of his own imminent extinction felt only too real. Even before the Lizards came, too many of the friends he’d had since the turn of the century and before had up and dropped dead on him, from heart disease or cancer or TB. Throw bullets and shell fragments into the mix and a fellow got the idea he was living on borrowed time.

“We’ll have the advantage of surprise,” Szymanski said.

Of course we will,
Mutt thought.
The Lizards’ll be surprised—hell, they’ll be amazed—we could be so stupid.
He couldn’t say that out loud, worse luck.

Captain Szymanski pulled a much-folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “Let’s have a look at the map,” he said.

Daniels and Muldoon crowded close. The map wasn’t anything fancy from the Army Corps of Engineers. Mutt recognized it at once: it had come from a Rand McNally road atlas, the same kind of map bus drivers had used to get his minor-league teams from one little town to the next. He’d used them himself when the drivers got lost, which they did with depressing regularity.

Szymanski pointed. “The Lizards are holding the territory on the eastern side of the Illinois River, here. Havana, right on the eastern bank where the Spoon flows into the Illinois, is the key to their position along this stretch of the river, and they’ve got one of their prison camps right outside of town. Our objective is breaking in there and getting some of those people out. If we can do it here, maybe we’ll be able to do it down at Cairo and even in St Louis. If we’re going to win this war, we have to break their grip on the Mississippi.”

“Sir, let’s us worry about doin’ this here little one right,” Mutt said. “We manage that, then the brass can start thinkin’ big.”

Herman Muldoon nodded vigorously. After a moment, so did Szymanski. “That makes sense,” he said. “I’ve been promised that we’ll have one hell of a diversion laid on when we go tonight. I don’t mean just the stuff on the Spoon River, either. We already know about that; it’s part of the basic plan. But this’ll be something special. I know that much, even if they haven’t told me what it’ll be.”

“Air support?” Muldoon asked, his voice eager. “When they have some, they don’t want to talk about it, in case somebody gets nabbed and spills his guts.”

“I don’t know, and what I don’t know I can’t tell you,” Szymanski answered. “If you want to make like that proves your point, go ahead. Don’t go telling the troops that’s what it is, though, because if it turns out not to be, their morale will suffer. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Muldoon said. Mutt nodded. If there wasn’t any air support, or some kind of pretty juicy diversion, a lot more than their morale would suffer. He didn’t say anything about that. Szymanski was still a kid, but he wasn’t a fool. He could figure things out for himself.

“Any more questions?” Szymanski asked. Mutt didn’t say anything. Neither did Muldoon. The captain folded up the map again and stuck it back in his pocket. “Okay, then. We wait for nightfall and we do it.” He got up and went off to brief his other platoon.

“He makes it sound easy,” Mutt said. He peered out through the screen of willow branches that hung down into the water and—he devoutly hoped—kept the Lizards on the other side of the Illinois from figuring out what the Americans were up to.

Ducks quacked on the far side of the river. The marshes over there were a national wildlife refuge. Mutt wished he could row across with a shotgun instead of the tommy gun he was toting. There had been an observation post over there, on top of a steel tower a hundred feet high. That had given the game wardens a dandy view of poachers. These days, it would have given the Lizards a dandy view of the surrounding countryside, but it had been blown up in one round or another of the fighting over central Illinois.

Troops were scattered up and down the river, to escape detection if possible and to seem like routine patrols if they were spotted. Mutt and Muldoon made the rounds, telling the men what Szymanski had told them. It wasn’t fresh news; they’d been getting ready for this mission quite a while now. Telling them one more time what they were supposed to do wasn’t going to hurt, though. More times than he could count, Mutt had seen a ballplayer swing when he’d got the bunt sign or take when the hit and run was on. Somebody was still likely to foul up some way or other, even after a last go-round. Mutt had long since given up expecting perfection in men or their plans.

Twilight fell, then darkness. In the water, a fish leaped and fell back with a splash. Back when Mutt had gone through this country in his minor-league playing days, they’d taken more fish out of the Illinois than from any other river save the Columbia. It wasn’t like that now, not with so many factories pouring filth into the water, but you could still do all right with a rod and reel, or even with a pole and a string and a hook.

Mutt looked down at his watch. The softly glowing numbers and hands told him it was a quarter to ten. “Into the boats,” he whispered. “And quietly, God damn it, or we’re dead meat before we even get goin’.”

At exactly ten o’clock by his watch, he and the rest of the company started rowing down the Illinois toward Havana. The oars seemed to make a dreadful racket as they dipped into the water and splashed out again, but no Lizard machine guns opened up on the far side of the river. Mutt sighed with relief. He’d been afraid they were heading into a trap right from the start.

At 10:02, artillery and mortars and machine guns opened up on Havana from the west and south. “Right on time,” Mutt said; in the sudden chaos, noise from the boats mattered a lot less.

The Lizards reacted promptly, with artillery of their own and with small-arms fire. Daniels tried to gauge whether they were shifting troops from the camp, which was north of Havana, to meet the noisy, obvious threat the Americans were showing them. For his sake, he hoped they were.

A hot yellow glow sprang up in the southwest and swiftly spread toward Havana. Mutt wanted to whoop with glee, but had the good sense to keep his voice down: “They really went and did it, boys. They lit off the Spoon River.”

“How many gallons of gas and oil did they pour into it before they lit a match?” somebody in the boat said. “How long could that stuff keep a tank running, or a plane?”

“I dunno,” Mutt answered. “I figure they’re usin’ it against the enemy this way, too, an’ if it rattles the Lizards so much that they forget to shoot at me, I ain’t gonna complain. Now come on, boys, we gotta pull like bastards, get across the Illinois before the Spoon runs into it. We don’t manage that”—he let out a wheezy chuckle—“our goose is cooked.”

Little tongues of flame, drifting on the water, were already at the junction of the rivers and starting to flow down the Illinois. More floating fire followed. The Lizards didn’t run gunboats along the river or anything like that, so the fire wasn’t likely to do them any real harm, but it did draw their attention toward the Spoon and the territory west of it—and away from the boats sliding down the Illinois toward Havana from the north.

“Come on, pull hard, come on, come—” Mutt tumbled off his seat in the middle of a word when the boat ran hard aground. He came up laughing. If you made a fool of yourself in front of your men, you had to admit it. He jumped out onto the riverbank. Mud squelched under his boots. “Let’s go break our boys outta stir.”

He looked away from the burning Spoon River to let his eyes adapt to the darkness. That black shape there wasn’t forest; the forest around it had been cut down. He waved an arm to urge his men after him and trotted toward the Lizards’ prison camp.

Not too far away, Sergeant Muldoon was warning, “Spread out, you dumb bastards. You want ’em to go picking you off the easy way?”

The prison camp was designed more to keep people in than to keep them out. Nothing prevented the Americans from drawing close to the main gate, which lay on the northern side. Mutt, in fact, was beginning to think they could march on in when a couple of Lizards did open up on them from a little guardhouse.

Grenades and submachine-gun fire quickly suppressed the opposition. “Come on, hurry up!” Mutt yelled all the same. “If those scaly sons of bitches had a radio, we’re gonna get company up here pretty damn quick!”

Soldiers with wire cutters attacked the razor wire of the gateway. From inside the camp, men—and women—roused by the gunfire (Mutt hoped nobody, or at least not too many people, had stopped stray bullets) crowded up to the gate. As soon as there was a pathway out of the camp for them, they started pouring forth.

Captain Szymanski shouted, “Anybody who wants to go back to fighting the Lizards full time, come with us. Lord knows you’ll be welcome. Otherwise, folks, scatter as best you can. We can use guerrillas, too, and a lot of people round about here will give you shelter and share what they’ve got. Good luck to you.”

“God bless you, sir,” a man called. More echoed that. Some people stuck close to their rescuers; others melted away into the night.

Firing picked up off to the south, and rapidly started getting closer. “Skirmish line forward!” Mutt called. “We gotta hold ’em off as long as we can, give people a chance to get away.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than what sounded like a hell of a big bomb landed right next to the advancing Lizards. He looked around wildly; he hadn’t heard any airplanes in the neighborhood. He still didn’t, as a matter of fact. But a long rumble of cloven air came from the sky, then slowly faded: it was as if the explosive or whatever it was had arrived before word of its coming.

“That’s got to be an American long-range rocket bomb,” Captain Szymanski said. Whatever it was, the Lizards weren’t steaming forward now the way they had been.

A few minutes later, another one of those rocket bombs went off, this one, by the sound of it, a couple of miles away from any of the fighting around Havana. The missiles didn’t seem to be what you’d call accurate; they could have come down here as easily as on the Lizards.
But try stopping them,
Daniels thought.
Go ahead and try.

In the darkness, he found Szymanski. “Sir, I think it’s about time to get the hell out of here. We stay around tryin’ to do more than we can, a lot of us’ll end up dead.”

“You’re probably right, Lieutenant,” the company commander said. “No, you’re certainly right.” He raised his voice: “Back to the river, men!”

Piling into one of the boats—now crowded almost to sinking with rescued prisoners—felt very good to Mutt. Getting back across the Illinois, though, made him sweat big drops. If a Lizard helicopter came chattering by overhead just now, there wouldn’t only be fire on the water: there’d be blood in it, too. Everybody understood that; the men at the oars pulled like maniacs as they got over to the west bank of the river.

Stumbling out of the boat and away, Mutt wondered if Sam Yeager had made the acquaintance of these fancy rockets (he also wondered, as he had ever since they’d separated outside Chicago, whether Sam was still alive to have met them). What with all the funny pulp magazines he’d always read, he’d be in better shape to make sense of this crazy new world than damn near anybody else.