Upsetting the Balance

Schultz grunted as he pried through the five-cylinder Shvetsov radial engine. Ludmila had come to know that grunt. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“One of the springs in your oil pump is starting to go,” he said. “Here, come see for yourself.”

She inspected the part. Sure enough, it wasn’t as strong as it should have been. She nodded with professional respect. The German got into everything, with monomaniacal thoroughness. She couldn’t imagine a Russian technician stripping down a part that wasn’t giving trouble. “Do we have spares for it?” she asked.

“I think so, yes, or if not I can steal one from a plane that’s down for some other reason,” Schultz said. Ludmila nodded; cannibalizing machines for parts happened all the time.

“Good. Do that at once,” she said.

He gave her an odd look. “But I have not yet seen what else may need fixing,” he said. “What do you think I am, some slapdash Russian? Finding one thing wrong does not mean there will be no more.” After a moment, he grunted again, and pointed up into the greasy bowels of the engine. “Here. Look.”

Ludmila, who was close to twenty centimeters shorter, had to stand on tiptoe to see what he was talking about. As she did so, he turned his head and planted a quick kiss on her cheek. Then he stepped back, grinning. As his advances went, that one was downright gentlemanly. She shook her head, exhaling through her nose in exasperation. “You ought to know better than that by now.”

“Why? Maybe I’ll get lucky one of these days,” he said, altogether unabashed. He grinned at her. “After all, Major Jager did.”

She hoped the light under the camouflage netting was too dim and gray for him to notice her flush, but if she’d seen him go red, he could probably see her. And she was sure she was red as fire now. She’d had a brief liaison with Jager when she’d flown Foreign Commissar Molotov to Berchtesgaden while Jager happened to be there to get a medal from Hitler for bringing explosive metal back to Germany.

“The major is a gentleman,” she said. “You-” She stopped in confusion. In the classless society the Soviet Union was building, you weren’t supposed to think or talk about gentlemen, let alone prefer them.

“Maybe,” Schultz said. “But I’m here and he’s not.”

Ludmila made a wordless sound of fury. She made it again when Schultz laughed at her, which only made him laugh harder. What she wanted to do was stalk indignantly out of the underground shelter. Wriggling out from under the camouflage net was a poor substitute, but it had to do.

A groundcrew man came hurrying over to smooth the netting and preserve themaskirovka. He said, “Comrade Pilot, they are ready to debrief you on your mission now.”

“Thank you,” she said, and hurried over to the underground bunkers that housed the air base’s personnel. More camouflage netting concealed the entrance. She pushed it aside to go in.

There had always been the hope that Colonel Karpov, the base commandant, would take her report, but no such luck. Behind a folding table in a chamber lit by four stinking candles sat Nikifor Sholudenko. She sighed internally; she and the NKVD man had come to the base together out of the Ukraine, so his presence here, like Schultz’s, was her own fault. That didn’t make him any easier to take.

“Sit, Comrade Pilot,” he urged, waving her to a battered armchair. Like hers, his Russian had a bit of a Ukrainian flavor in it. He handed her a glass. “Here, drink this. It will make you feel better after your dangerous flight.”

The glass held a reddish liquid. Weak tea? She sipped cautiously. No-pepper vodka, smoother than anything she’d had in quite a while. All the same, she sipped cautiously.

“Drink, drink,” Sholudenko urged her. His eyes glittered avidly in the candlelight. “It will relax you.”

He wanted her relaxed, all right. She sighed again. Sometimes facing the Lizards was easier than coming back and trying to deal with her own side.

A few kilometers south of Pskov, Lizard artillery hammered at the line the Russians and Germans had built together to try to hold the aliens away from the northwestern Russian city. George Bagnall watched the explosions from Pskov’sKrom, the old stone fortress that sat on the high ground where the Velikaya and Pskova rivers came together. TheKrom wasn’t quite in range of the Lizards’ guns-he hoped.

Beside him, Ken Embry sighed. “They’re catching it pretty hard out there.”

“I know,” Bagnall answered. “There but for mistrust go we.”

Embry snorted, though it wasn’t really funny. He’d piloted the Lancaster bomber on which Bagnall had served as flight engineer when they brought an airborne radar to Pskov to help the Soviets in their struggle against the Lizards. The mission had been hurried, and imperfectly conceived. Nobody’d bothered to tell the RAF men, for instance, that Pskov wasn’t altogether in Soviet hands. The Russians shared it uneasily with the Germans, each side hating the Lizards just a little-sometimes a very little-more than it did the other.