Upsetting the Balance

As Ludmila approached the airstrip, a fellow who looked like any other peasant took off his hat and waved at her with it in his left hand. She accepted the course correction and shifted slightly more to the north.

TheKukuruznik bounced to a stop. It was light enough to have no trouble on plowed-up dirt, and to stop very quickly once the wheels touched down. Like moles emerging from their burrows, groundcrew men dashed toward the biplane, and reached it before the prop had stopped spinning.

“Out, out, out!” they yelled, not that Ludmila wasn’t already descending from the U-2. No sooner had her boots touched ground than they manhandled the biplane toward what looked like just another piece of field. But two of them had run ahead to pull aside the camouflage netting that covered a broad trench. In went the aircraft. Back went the netting. Within two minutes of landing, not a trace of theKukuruznik remained visible.

Ludmila ducked under the netting, too, to help ready the biplane for its next mission. She’d made herself into a good mechanic. Red Air Force pilots needed to be good mechanics, because very often the groundcrew weren’t. That wasn’t the case here; one of the fellows at the base was as good a technician and repairman as she’d ever known. Even so, she helped him as much as she could. It was, after all, her own neck.

“Zdrast’ye,Comrade Pilot,” the mechanic said in accented Russian. He was a tall, lean, ginger-bearded fellow with a grin that said he refused to take her or anything else too seriously.

“Zdrast’ye,”she answered shortly. Georg Schultz was a genius with a spanner in his hands, but he was also a dedicated Nazi, a panzer gunner who’d attached himself to the airbase staff when they were still operating out of the Ukraine. She’d helped him get his place there; she’d known him and his commander, Heinrich Jager, before. Every so often, she wondered how wise she’d been.

“How did it go?” he asked, this time in German, of which she had a smattering: more than that now, thanks to practice with Jager and with Schultz.

“Well enough,” she answered in the same language. She turned away from him toward theKukuruznik so she wouldn’t have to notice the way his eyes roamed up and down her body as if she were naked rather than covered by a heavy leather flight suit. His hands had tried roaming up and down her body a couple of times, too. She’d said no as emphatically as she knew how, butnyet wasn’t a Russian word he seemed to have grasped. For that matter, he wasn’t what you’d call solid onnein, either.

Maybe her indifference was finally getting through to him, though; the next question he asked seemed strictly business: “Did you fly over the crater from the big bomb you people set off a little while ago?”

“Aber naturlich,”she answered. “It’s a good direction from which to approach: I can be sure no Lizard guns will be waiting for me from that position, and it lets me penetrate deep into their lines.”

Schultz puffed out his chest. “Me and Major Jager-Colonel Jager now-we were part of the raiding crew that got you Russkis the metal I expect you used to build that bomb.”

“Were you?” She wanted the words to come out cold as ice, but they didn’t, quite. One thing she reluctantly granted Schultz was his habit of telling the truth as he saw it. She found that sort of bluntness alarming in a way: how had he managed to keep it without getting raked over the coals by theGestapo? Any Russian so outspoken would have ended up in agulag, if he wasn’t simply executed as an enemy of the state. But Ludmila was willing to believe Schultz wasn’t lying just to impress her.

He preened some more. “Yes, we certainly were. Hadn’t been for us Germans, you Reds never would have been able to build your bomb at all.”

Ludmila felt like slapping his smug face. “I don’t suppose you Germans”-she deliberately used the Russian word,nemtsi, with its overtones of barbarism and unintelligible babbling-“would do anything like that if you didn’t get your own share of the metal, too. As you say, we built a bomb with ours. Where is the German bomb?”

Georg Schultz went a dull red. Ludmila chuckled under her breath. The Nazis thought of themselves as the lords of creation and of their Slavic neighbors as subhuman, certainly incapable of a scientific feat like the explosive-metal bomb. Reminding them that wasn’t so always gave a Russian pleasure.

“Let’s look over the aircraft,” Schultz mumbled. Ludmila didn’t argue with him-that was what they were supposed to be doing. With tools in his hands, Schultz became useful enough for her to overlook, if not to forgive, his appalling politics. His piggish approaches to her she already discounted. Plenty of Russian men were just as uncultured-Nikifor Sholudenko, for instance. The NKVD man would be debriefing her as soon as she was done inspecting the U-2.