Upsetting the Balance

She had to look sharp to find the first mat that concealed a U-2. When she did, she started counting; her aircraft was fifth in line. She paused outside the trench in which it rested, bent down, leaned her head toward the mat. Yes, someone was down in there; she could hear soft, muffled noises.

“Bozhemoi,”she whispered silently. The better to preserve themaskirovka, no one, not even groundcrew, hung around the airplanes when they weren’t heading out to a mission or coming back from one. Had the Lizards managed to find a human being who would do sabotage for them here? Ludmila hadn’t imagined such a thing was possible, but then, she hadn’t imagined how many Soviet citizens would go over to the Germans, either.

As quietly as she could, she drew her pistol out of its holster. Then she tiptoed around to the deep end of the trench, where her arrival would be least expected. Before she lifted up a corner of the mat, she paused to listen again. The noises seemed fainter here. She nodded in grim satisfaction. She’d give the wrecker in there something to remember as long as he lived, which wouldn’t be long.

She slid under the mat and dropped down to the dirt beneath. The bottom of the trench was almost three meters below ground level. She landed hard, but didn’t try to stay on her feet. If by some mischance the wrecker had a gun, too, a prone figure made a smaller target than an upright one.

It was dim and dark under the matting. Even so, she had no trouble picking out the pale body-no, bodies: there were two of them, something she hadn’t thought of-under one wing of theKukuruznik. They both lay on the ground, too. Had she alerted them when she jumped down into the trench?

“Stop what you’re doing!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, swinging the muzzle of the Tokarev automatic toward them.

Only then did she realize the two bodies seemed so pale and white because she was seeing skin, not clothes. “Gott in Himmel,is that you, Ludmila Vadimovna?” Georg Schultz demanded. “You don’t want me, and now you want to kill me for finding somebody else? Are you crazy?”

“Bozhemoi,”Ludmila repeated, this time quite loudly. She started to giggle. The giggles turned to guffaws. “I thought you were sabotaging theKukuruznik, not-not-” Laughter swallowed speech.

“Not funny,” Schultz muttered. He was on his feet now, getting into his clothes as fast as he could. So was his partner. Ludmila’s eyes were more used to the gloom now. They widened as she recognized Tatiana Pirogova.

“Iam sorry,” Ludmila said, speaking very quietly and taking only tiny breaths to hold mirth in check. “The only reason I came here was to mount a spare compass on the aircraft, and-” She thought too much about the use of the wordmount in another context, and couldn’t go on. Tears filled her eyes as she sputtered and coughed.

Tatiana Pirogova strode up to her. The blond sniper was several centimeters taller than Ludmila, and glared down at her. “If ever you speak a word of this to anyone-toanyone, do you understand me? — I will kill you,” she hissed. Even in the dimness under the matting, her blue eyes glittered dangerously.

“Your top tunic button is still undone, dear,” Ludmila answered. Tatiana’s fingers flew to it of themselves Ludmila went on, “I’m not in the habit of gossiping, but if you threaten me, you are making a big mistake.” Tatiana turned her back. Ludmila looked over to Georg Schultz, switching to German as she did so: “Will you please make her believe I’m just as glad to have you with someone else so you’re not pestering me any more? Just thinking of that is more likely to keep me quiet than her bluster.”

“It’s not bluster,” he answered, also in German.

That was probably-no, certainly-true. Tatiana with a scope-mounted rifle in her hand was as deadly a soldier as any. And Ludmila had also seen that Schultz was a viciously effective combat soldier even without his panzer wrapped around him. She wondered if that shared delight in war was what had drawn him and Tatiana together. But she’d been in enough combat herself to keep Tatiana or Georg Schultz from intimidating her.

Schultz spoke to Tatiana in the same sort of mixture of German and Russian he used to talk with Ludmila. Tatiana angrily brushed aside his reassurances. “Oh, go away,” she snapped. Instead, she went away herself, slithering out from under the netting at the shallow end of the trench that hid theKukuruznik. Even in her fury, she carefully smoothed out the net after she got free of it, so as not to damage themaskirovka.

“You might have waited another minute or two before you jumped down in here,” Schultz said petulantly. He hadn’t finished, then. That set Ludmila laughing yet again. “It isn’t funny,” he growled. It occurred to her then that the two of them were alone under the netting. Had she not had the Tokarev, she would have worried. As things were, she knew she could take care of herself.