Striking the Balance (9 page)

A typically arrogant German, he assumed she spoke his language. As it happened, he was right this time. “Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, Red Air Force,” Ludmila answered in German. “I have with me a despatch for General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt from General Chill in Pskov. Will you be so kind as to take me to him? And will you camouflage this aircraft so the Lizards cannot spot it?”

The Hitlerite soldiers drew back in surprise to hear her voice. She was sitting in the cockpit, and her leather flying helmet and thick winter gear had effectively disguised her sex. The German who’d spoken before leered now and said, “We’ve heard of pilots who call themselves Stalin’s Hawks. Are you one of Stalin’s Sparrows?”

Now he used
du
rather than
Sie.
Ludmila wasn’t sure whether he intended the familiar intimacy or insult. Either way, she didn’t care for it. “Perhaps,” she answered in a voice colder than the weather, “but only if you’re one of Hitler’s Jackasses.”

She waited to see whether that would amuse or anger the German. She was in luck; not only did he laugh, he threw back his head and brayed like a donkey. “You have to be a jackass to end up in a godforsaken place like this,” he said. “All right,
Kamerad—no, Kameradin—
Senior Lieutenant, I’ll take you to headquarters. Why don’t you just come along with me?”

Several Germans ended up escorting her, maybe as guards, maybe because they didn’t want to leave her alone with the first one, maybe for the novelty of walking along with a woman while on duty. She did her best to ignore them; Riga interested her more.

Even after being battered by years of war, it didn’t look like a godforsaken place to her. The main street—Brivibas Street, it was called (her eyes and brain needed a little while to adjust to the Latin alphabet)—had more shops, and smarter-looking ones, than she’d seen in Kiev. The clothes civilians wore on the street were shabby and none too clean, but of better fabric and finer cut than would have been usual in Russia or the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Some of the people recognized her gear. In spite of her German escort, they yelled at her in accented Russian and in Latvian. She knew the Russian was insulting, and the Latvian sounded less than complimentary. To rub in the point, one of the Germans said, “They love you here in Riga.”

“There are plenty of places where they love Germans even more,” she said, which made the Nazi shut up with a snap. Had it been a chess game, she would have won the exchange.

The
Rathaus
where the German commandant had his headquarters was near the corner of Brivibas and Kaleiyu Streets. To Ludmila, the German-style building looked old as time. Like the
Krom
in Pskov, it had no sentries on the outside to give away its location to the Lizards. Once inside the ornately carved doors, though, Ludmila found herself inspected by two new and hostile Germans in cleaner, fresher uniforms than she was used to seeing.

“What do you have here?” one of them asked her escort.

“Russian flier. She says she has a despatch from Pskov for the commanding general,” the talky soldier answered. “I figured we’d bring her here and let you headquarters types sort things out.”

“She?” The sentry looked Ludmila over in a different way. “By God, it is a woman, isn’t it? Under all that junk she’s wearing, I couldn’t tell.”

He plainly assumed she spoke only Russian. She did her best to look down her nose at him, which wasn’t easy, since he was probably thirty centimeters the taller. In her best German, she said, “It will never matter to you one way or the other, I promise you that.”

The sentry stared at her. Her escorts, who’d been chatting with her enough to see her more or less as a human being—and who, like any real fighting men, had no great use for headquarters troops—suppressed their snickers not quite well enough. That made the sentry look even less happy. In a voice full of winter, he said, “Come with me. I will take you to the commandant’s adjutant.”

The adjutant was a beefy, red-faced fellow with a captain’s two pips on his shoulder straps. He said, “Give me this despatch, young lady.
Generalleutnant Graf
Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt is a busy man. I shall convey to him your message as soon as it is convenient.”

Maybe he thought the titles and double-barreled name would impress her. If so, he forgot he was dealing with a socialist. Ludmila stuck out her chin and looked stubborn.
“Nein,”
she said. “I was told by General Chill to give the message to your commandant, not to anyone else. I am a soldier, I follow orders.”

Red-Face turned redder. “One moment,” he said, and got up from his desk. He went through a door behind it. When he came out again, he might have been chewing on a lemon. “The commandant will see you.”

“Good.” Ludmila headed for that door herself. Had the adjutant not hastily got out of her way, she would have walked right over him.

She’d expected an overbred aristocrat with pinched features, a haughty expression, and a monocle. Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt had pinched features, all right, but plainly for no other reason than that he was a sick man. His skin looked like yellow parchment drawn tight over bones. When he was younger and healthier, he’d probably been handsome. Now he was just someone carrying on as best he could despite illness.

He did get up and bow to her, which took her by surprise. His cadaverous smile said he’d noticed, too. Then he surprised her again, saying in Russian, “Welcome to Riga, Senior Lieutenant. So—what news do you bring me from Lieutenant General Chill?”

“Sir, I don’t know.” Ludmila took out the envelope and handed it to him. “Here is the message.”

Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt started to open it, then paused and got up from his chair again. He hurriedly left the office by a side door. When he came back, his face was even paler than it had been. “I beg your pardon,” he said, finishing the job of opening the envelope. “I seem to have come down with a touch of dysentery.”

He had a lot more than a touch; by the look of him, he’d fall over dead one fine day before too long. Intellectually, Ludmila had known the Nazis clung to their posts with as much courage and dedication—or fanaticism, one—as anyone else. Seeing that truth demonstrated, though, sometimes left her wondering how decent men could follow such a system.

That made her think of Heinrich Jäger and, a moment later, start to blush. General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt was studying General Chill’s note. To her relief, he didn’t notice her turning pink. He grunted a couple of times, softly, unhappily. At last, he looked up from the paper and said, “I am very sorry, Senior Lieutenant, but I cannot do as the German commandant of Pskov requests.”

She hadn’t imagined a German could put that so delicately. Even if he was a Hitlerite, he was
kulturny.
“What does General Chill request, sir?” she asked, then added a hasty amendment: “if it’s not too secret for me to know.”

“By no means,” he answered—he spoke Russian like an aristocrat. “He wanted me to help resupply him with munitions—” He paused and coughed.

“So he would not have to depend on Soviet equipment, you mean,” Ludmila said.

“Just so,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt agreed. “You saw the smoke in the harbor, though?” He courteously waited for her nod before continuing, “That is still coming from the freighters the Lizards caught there, the freighters that were full of arms and ammunition of all sorts. We shall be short here because of that, and have none to spare for our neighbors.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ludmila said, and found she was not altogether lying for the sake of politeness. She didn’t want the Germans in Pskov strengthened in respect to Soviet forces there, but she didn’t want them weakened in respect to the Lizards, either. Finding a balance that would let her be happy on both those counts would not be easy. She went on, “Do you have a written reply for me to take back to Lieutenant General Chill?”

“I shall draft one for you,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt said. “But first—Beck!” He raised his voice. The adjutant came bounding into the room. “Fetch the senior lieutenant here something from the mess,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt told him. “She has come a long way on a sleeveless errand, and she could no doubt do with something hot.”

“Jawohl, Herr Generalleutnant!”
Beck said. He turned to Ludmila. “If you would be so kind as to wait one moment, please, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova.” He dipped his head, almost as if he were a maitre d’ in some fancy, decadent capitalist restaurant, then hurried away. If his commander accepted Ludmila, he accepted her, too.

When Captain Beck came back, he carried on a tray a large, steaming bowl.
“Maizes zupe ar putukrejumu,
a Latvian dish,” he said. “It’s corn soup with whipped cream.”

“Thank you,” Ludmila said, and dug in. The soup was hot and thick and filling, and didn’t taste that alien. Russian-style cooking used a lot of cream, too, though sour as often as sweet.

While Ludmila ate, Beck went out to his own office, then came back a couple of minutes later to lay a sheet of paper on General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt’s desk. The German commander at Riga studied the message and glanced over at Ludmila, but kept silent until, with a sigh, she set down the bowl. Then he said, “I have a favor to ask of you. If you don’t mind.”

“That depends on what sort of favor it is,” she answered cautiously.

Graf
Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt’s smile made him look like a skeleton that had just heard a good joke. “I assure you, Senior Lieutenant, I have no improper designs upon your undoubtedly fair body. This is a purely military matter, one where you can help us.”

“I didn’t think you had designs on me, sir,” Ludmila said.

“No?” The German general smiled again. “How disappointing.” While Ludmila was trying to figure out how to take that, Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt went on, “We are in contact with a number of partisan bands in Poland.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “I suppose I should note, this is partisan warfare against the Lizards, not against the
Reich.
The bands have in them Germans, Poles, Jews—even a few Russians, I have heard. This particular one, down near Hrubieszów, has informed us they could particularly use some antipanzer mines. You could fly those mines to them faster than we could get them there any other way. What say you?”

“I don’t know,” Ludmila answered. “I am not under your command. Have you no aircraft of your own?”

“Aircraft, yes, a few, but none like that Flying Sewing Machine in which you arrived,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt said. Ludmila had heard that German nickname for the U-2 before; it never failed to fill her with wry pride. The general went on, “My last Fieseler
Storch
liaison plane could have done the job, but it was hit a couple of weeks ago. You know what the Lizards do to larger, more conspicuous machines. Hrubieszów is about five hundred kilometers south and a little west of here. Can you do the job? I might add that the panzers you help disable will probably benefit Soviet forces as much as those of the
Wehrmacht.”

Since the Germans had driven organized Soviet forces—as opposed to partisans—deep into Russia, Ludmila had her doubts about that. Still, the situation had grown extremely fluid since the Lizards arrived, and a senior lieutenant in the Red Air Force did not know all there was to know about deployments, either. Ludmila said, “Will you be able to get word to Lieutenant General Chill without my flying back to give it to him?”

“I think we can manage that,” Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt answered. “If it’s all that stands in the way of your flying this mission, I’m sure we can manage it.”

Ludmila considered. “You’ll have to give me petrol to get there,” she said at last. “As a matter of fact, the partisans will have to give me petrol to let me get back. Have they got any?”

“They should be able to lay their hands on some,” the German general said. “After all, it hasn’t been used much in Poland since the Lizards came. And, of course, when you return here, we will give you fuel for your return flight to Pskov.”

She hadn’t even asked about that yet. In spite of that forbidding name and those titles,
Generalleutnant Graf
Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt was indeed a gentleman of the old school. That helped Ludmila make up her mind to nod in agreement to him. Later, she would decide she should have picked better reasons for making up her mind.

Richard Peterson was a decent technician but, as far as Brigadier General Leslie Groves was concerned, a hopeless stick-in-the-mud. He sat in the hard chair in Groves’ office in the Science Building of the University of Denver and said, “This containment scheme you have in mind, sir, it’s going to be hard to maintain it and increase plutonium production at the same time.”

Groves slammed a big, meaty fist down on the desk. He was a big, meaty man, with short-cropped, gingery hair, a thin mustache, and the blunt features of a mastiff. He had a mastiff’s implacable aggressiveness, too. “So what are you telling me, Peterson?” he rumbled ominously. “Are you saying we’re going to start leaking radioactives into the river so the Lizards can figure out where they are? You’d better not be saying that, because you know what’ll happen if you are.”

“Of course I know.” Peterson’s voice went high and shrill. “The Lizards will blow us to kingdom come.”

“That’s just exactly right,” Groves said. “I’m damn lucky I wasn’t in Washington, D.C., when they dropped their bomb there.” He snorted. “All they got rid of in Washington was some Congresscritters—odds are, they helped the war effort. But if they land one on Denver, we can’t make any more nuclear bombs of our own. And if we can’t do that, we lose the war.”

“I know that, too,” Peterson answered. “But the reprocessing plant can only do so much. If you get more plutonium out of it, you put more byproducts into the filters—and if they make it through the filters, they go into the South Platte.”

“We have to have more plutonium,” Groves said flatly. “If that means putting in more filters or doing more scrubbing of the ones we have, then take care of it. That’s what you’re for. You tell me you can’t do it, I’ll find somebody who can, I promise you that. You’ve got top priority for getting materials, not just from Denver but from all over the country. Use it or find another job.”