Upsetting the Balance

“But they’re more likely to notice us carrying the stuff at night,” Skorzeny argued. “You carry boxes during the day, you’re a workman. You carry boxes at night, if you’re lucky people think you’re a burglar on your way to do a job. You aren’t so lucky, they think you’ve already done it and they try to rob you.”

“No,” Jager said yet again. “The park is just a little ways away-that’s why we took this flat, remember? We can carry all our gear in one trip, set up in the middle of that nice stand of elms we found, and start firing. We can get off eight or ten bombs in a minute or so and then get the hell out of there. What could be better than that?”

“Watching the fur fly,” Skorzeny answered without hesitation. Then he sighed. “I don’t suppose we could do that anyway. Wouldn’t be a good idea to walk past the factory on our way out of town.”

“Why?” Jager said in mock astonishment. “Just because we’ll have lobbed eight or ten bombs full of Tabun into it and around the neighborhood? All we’d have to do is hold our breath as we went by.”

“You’re right-maybe we could get away with it.” Before Jager could explode, Skorzeny laughed at him. “I’m joking, son, I’m joking.”

“Tabun isn’t anything to joke about.” Jager cast a respectful eye on the mortar bombs he and Skorzeny had carried down through the Lizard lines from Germany. Had one of those bombs developed the tiniest leak, the sun would have gone dark in the sky, his lungs would have stopped working, and he wouldn’t have made it to Albi.

“Well, I don’t say you’re wrong about that,” Skorzeny answered. “It’s some very nasty stuff, for a fact. TheFuhrer wasn’t going to use it, even against the Lizards, till the British hauled out their mustard gas. Then I suppose he decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”

“TheFuhrer knows about gas,” Jager said. “He was in the trenches in France himself.” He remembered his own days there, the frantic cries of alarm when the gas shells started landing, the struggle to get your mask on and tight before the tendrils of poison reached you and started eating your lungs, the anguished cries of comrades who hadn’t grabbed their masks fast enough, the stifling feel of every breath, the way you started wanting to tear off the mask after you’d worn it for hours on end, no matter what happened to you once you did… Across a quarter of a century, those memories remained vivid enough to make the fear sweat prickle up under his arms.

Grumpily, Otto Skorzeny said, “All right, Jager, we’ll do it your way, tonight when it’s nice and dark. Should be clear, too, which won’t be bad if we can spy the North Star through the trees. Give us a better gauge of true north than our compasses would if somebody’s tampered with our marks.”

“That’s true,” Jager said. They’d picked the spot from which they would fire a good while before. Thanks to some excellent maps of Albi and their French friends (no, not friends, partners: the Frenchmen had been enemies of Vichy when Petain collaborated with the Germans, and remained enemies now that he was collaborating with the Lizards), they knew the range and bearing from their chosen copse in the Parc Rochegude to the gas-mask factory, to within a few meters and minutes of the arc. It was just a matter of getting the mortar pointing in the right direction, fiddling with the elevation screw, and firing away.

To kill time till darkness fell, they played skat. As he usually did, Skorzeny won money from Jager. They were playing for Vichy francs, though, so the losses hardly felt real. Jager thought of himself as a pretty fair cardplayer, and wondered if Skorzeny cheated. He’d never caught him at it and, if he did, Skorzeny would make jokes about it and turn it into a lark. What could you do?

When twilight came and the sky turned purple-gray, Skorzeny stuck the cards in his pocket and said, “Shall I make us some supper?”

“I thought you wanted us to live till tonight,” Jager said, which earned him a glare from the bigger man. As anyone does who spends time in the field, Skorzeny had learned to cook after a fashion: roasted meats, stews made from whatever was handy thrown into a pot and stuck over the fire for a while. Since Jager cooked the same way, he waved a hand to tell Skorzeny to go ahead.

You couldn’t do a lot to mess up beans and cabbage and onions and carrots and potatoes. The stew was bland and boring, but it filled the belly. At the moment, Jager didn’t care about anything else. The flat had good blackout curtains. That let him turn on the electric lights after supper, and let Skorzeny win more funny money from him with those possibly trained pasteboards.

Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven… the hours crawled slowly past. When midnight struck, Skorzeny loaded the thirty kilos of mortar onto his back, slung into a big cloth bag. Jager carried the bombs in the packs he and the SS man had used to bring them down from German-held territory.