In the Balance

Such tricks had not entirely spared it from damage. Stolid, wide-shouldered women in shawls and drab dresses carried bricks and chunks of wood away from a recent bomb hit. The sick-sweet stink of day before yesterday’s battlefield hung over the place. That smell always made Jager’s heart beat faster in remembered fear.

Skorzeny grunted and put a hand over the right side of his belly. Jager thought the SS man’s reaction similar to his own until he realized Skorzeny’s face held real pain. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My fucking gall bladder,” the Hauptsturmfuhrer answered. “It had me in the hospital for a while earlier this year. But the doctors say it isn’t going to kill me, and lying around on my backside is a bloody bore, so here I am up and doing again. A good thing, too.”

“You were here on the Eastern Front before, sir?” Georg Schultz asked.

“Yes, with Das Reich,” Skorzeny said.

Schultz nodded and said nothing more. Jager could guess what he was thinking. A lot of people who saw action on the Eastern Front would fall down on their knees and thank God for an illness that got them sent back to Germany and safety. Skorzeny, by the way he talked, would sooner have stayed and fought He didn’t sound as though he were bluffing, either. Jager’s respect for him went up a notch.

In spite of the Lizards’ air raids, the Kremlin still swarmed with life. Occasional holes merely showed Jager the soldiers and bureaucrats bustling about within, in the same way as he could have seen the humming life inside an anthill with its top kicked off.

He was not surprised to find Skorzeny heading for the same doorway as he and Jager used: naturally, the SS man would also be meeting with officers from the Defense Commissariat. The doorway into the Kremlin itself, like the one into the compound around it, was guarded. The lieutenant who headed this detachment put out his hand without a word. Without a word, Jager and Schultz gave him their documents. Without a word, he studied and returned them.

Then he turned to Skorzeny, his hand still outstretched. An impish grin lit the big man’s face. He seized the Russian lieutenant’s hand, vigorously pumped it up and down. The guards stared in disbelief. The lieutenant managed to return a sickly smile. A couple of his men had raised their submachine guns. When he smiled, they lowered them again.

“Talk about balls, one of these days he’s going to get his blown off, playing games like that,” Schultz said out of the side of his mouth.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Jager answered. He’d known a few people who simply bulled their way through life, charging at the world with such headlong aggression that it gave way before them. Skorzeny seemed to be of that stripe. On a larger scale, so did Adolf Hitler… and Stalin.

It was easier to think of the Soviet leader than of Hitler as Jager let the immensity of the Kremlin swallow him and Schultz. Skorzeny followed. Just inside the doorway stood a pair of Russian lieutenant colonels: no Germans would go wandering unescorted through the Red Army’s holy of holies.

One of the Russian officers wore a tankman’s black collar patches. “Good morning, Major Jager, Sergeant Schultz,” he said in excellent German.

“Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov,” Jager said, nodding back politely. Viktor Kraminov had been assigned to Schultz and him since they came to Moscow. They might have traded shots with each other the year before, for Kraminov had been part of Marshal Budenny’s southern Soviet army before being transferred to staff duty in Moscow. He had an old man’s wise eyes set in a face of childlike innocence, and knew more about handling panzers than Jager would have expected from the Russians’ battle performance.

The other lieutenant colonel, a fellow Jager had not seen before, wore green collar patches. Georg Schultz frowned. “What’s green stand for?” he whispered.

Jager needed a minute to think. Russian infantry patches were maroon; tanks, artillery, and engineers black; cavalry dark blue; air force light blue. But what Soviet service wore green as its Waffenfarbe? Jager stiffened. “He’s NKVD,” he whispered back.

Schultz flinched. Jager didn’t blame him. Just as no Russian soldier would want to run across the Gestapo, so the Germans naturally grew nervous at the sight of an officer of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior, if he’d come across the NKVD man a year ago, he would have shot him at once; German orders were to take no secret policemen or political commissars alive, regardless of the laws of war.

After one brief glance, the NKVD lieutenant colonel ignored the two Germans in civilian clothes; he’d been waiting for Otto Skorzeny. “A very good day to you, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer,” he said. His German was even better than Kraminov’s. He sounded fussily precise, like about half of Jager’s old Gymnasium teachers.