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The second pair followed a moment later. Then Skorzeny yelled “Go! Go! Go!” again and Jager and Max burst out of the woods and started off toward the promised panje wagon. It waited several kilometers north and west, outside the Lizards’ tightest security zone. Jager wanted to sprint the whole way. Slogging through mud carrying a heavy chest, that wasn’t practical.
“I’m fucking sick of rain,” Max said, though he knew as well as Jager that the snow which would follow was even harder to endure.
Jager said, “Right now I don’t mind rain at all. The Lizards will have a harder time chasing us through it than they would on dry ground. The low clouds will make us harder to spot through the air, too. If you want to get right down to it, I wouldn’t mind fog, either.”
“I would,” Max said. “We’d get lost.”
“I have a compass.”
“Very efficient,” Max said dryly. Jager took it for a compliment until he remembered it was the word the Jew had used to describe the assembly-line murder at-what was the name of the place? — at Babi Yar, that was it.
Anger surged in the panzer major. The trouble was, he had trouble deciding whether to turn it on his own people for dishonoring the uniforms they wore or the Jew for telling him about it and making him notice it. He glanced over at Max. As usual, Max was watching him. He had no trouble finding a focus for his fury.
Jager twisted his head, looked behind him. The driving rain had already obscured the woods. He could see one of the decoy pairs, but only one. He wouldn’t have wanted to track anyone in weather like this, and wished just as much trouble on the Lizards. They wouldn’t pursue in panzers, anyhow; from what he’d seen, their armor had at least as much trouble coping with Russian mud as the Wehrmacht did.
He must have been thinking aloud. Max grinned an unsympathetic grin and said, “You poor bogged-down bastards.”
“Fuck you, too, Max.” In the wrong tone of voice, that would have started the fight Skorzeny had not-quite-joked about. As it was, the Jewish partisan’s expression changed shape as if he, like Jager, had to change some of his thinking.
Then both men’s faces congealed to fear. The Lizards had more helicopters in the air, and this time no flak cannon would stop them. Rifle shots rang out from back in the woods, but using a rifle against one of these machines was as magnificently futile as the Polish lancers’ charges against German panzers back when the war-the human war-was new.
But these rifle bullets did have some effect. The whistling roar of the copter rotors grew no louder. The deadly machines hovered over the trees. Their guns snarled. When they paused, more rifle fire announced that they hadn’t finished off all the raiders. The yarnmering resumed.
The sound from the helicopters changed. Jager looked back, but could see nothing through the curtains of rain. He tried to be optimistic anyhow: “Maybe they’re settling down so they can comb through the woods-if they are, they’ll be looking in the wrong place.”
Max was less sanguine: “Don’t count on them to be so fucking stupid.”
“They aren’t what you’d call good soldiers, not in the tactical sense,” Jager answered seriously. “They’re brave enough, and of course they have all that wonderful equipment, but ask them to do anything they haven’t planned out in advance and they start floundering around.” They’re even worse than Russians that way, he thought, but he kept quiet about that.
The strafing from the helicopters hadn’t slaughtered all the raiders. Rifles barked again; a Soviet submachine gun added its note to the din. Then, harsher and flatter, Lizard automatic small arms answered.
“They have landed troops!” Jager exclaimed. “The longer they waste time back there, the better the chance the mission has of succeeding.”
“And the likelier they’ll kill off my friends,” Max said. “Yours too, I suppose. Does a fucking Nazi have friends? After a tough day shooting Jews in the back of the neck, do you go out and drink some beer with your Kameraden?”
“I’m a soldier, not a butcher,” Jager said. He wondered whether Georg Schultz had got one of the dummy chests. If so, he was tramping through the mud, too. If not… He also wondered about Otto Skorzeny. The SS captain seemed to have a gift for creating impossible situations and then escaping from them. He’d need all that gift now. But thinking of the SS made Jager think of Babi Yar. That would have been their doing; Wehrmacht men couldn’t have stomached it. He added, “You Russians have butchers, too.”
“So?” Max said. “Does that make you right?” Jager found no good answer. The Jewish partisan went on, “I wish they’d sent me to the gulag in Siberia years before you fucking Germans ever got to Kiev. Then I wouldn’t have had to see what I saw.”
Further argument cut off abruptly when Jager fell headlong into the muck. Max helped him haul himself to his feet. They pushed on. Jager felt as if he were a hundred years old. A kilometer through this clinging goo was worse than a day’s march on hard, dry ground. He wistfully wondered whether the Soviet Union contained so much as a square centimeter of hard, dry ground at the moment.
He also wondered for what the soft, wet ground over which he was fleeing had been used. In Germany, land had a clearly defined purpose: meadow, crops, forest, park, town. This stretch met no such criteria. It was just land-raw terrain. Of that the Soviet Union had unending inefficient abundance.
Jager abruptly cut off his disparaging thoughts about Soviet inefficiency. His head went up like a hunted animal’s. The tiny, atrophied muscles in his ears tried to make them prick like a cat’s. Lizard helicopters were in the air again. “We have to move faster,” he said to Max.
The partisan pointed to his own trousers, which were covered in mud up to the knees. He dismissed Jager’s suggestion with three sardonic words: “Good fucking luck.”
Rationally, Jager knew Max was right. Still, as the whirring drone from the sky grew louder, he wanted to drop the heavy chest and run. He looked over his shoulder. The driving rain veiled the helicopter from sight. He could only hope it helped hide him from the Lizards.
Off to the south, from the middle of this big open field, shots cracked; Jager recognized the deep bark of a Gewehr-98K, the standard German infantry rifle (no way to tell now, of course, whether it was borne by a standard German infantryman or a very definitely nonstandard Russian partisan). The helicopter that had been closest to him droned off to meet the fleabite challenge.
“I think some of the decoys just drew them away from us,” Jager said.
“It might be a Jew saving your neck, Nazi. How does that make you feel?” Max said. After a moment, though, he added in wondering tones, “Or it might be a fucking Nazi saving mine. How does that make me feel? You know the word verkakte, Nazi? This is a verkakte mess, and no mistake.”
A village-maybe even a small town-loomed out of the rain ahead. In instant unspoken agreement, both men swerved wide around it. “What’s the name of that place?” Jager asked.
“Chernobyl, I think,” Max said. “The Lizards drove the people out after their ship blew up, but they might keep a little garrison there.”
“Let’s hope they don’t,” Jager said. The Jewish partisan nodded.
If the village held a garrison, it didn’t come forth to search for the raiders… or maybe it did, and simply missed Jager and Max in the downpour. Once past the clump of ugly wooden buildings and even uglier concrete ones, Jager glanced down at his compass to get back onto the proper course.
Max watched him put it back in his pocket “How are we going to find the fucking panje wagon?”
“We keep on this heading until-”
“-we walk past them in the rain,” the Jew put in.
“If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” Jager said icily.
“I don’t. I was hoping you did.”
They pushed on, skirting another small patch of woods and then returning to the course the compass dictated. Jager had a piece of black bread and some sausage in his pack. Getting them out one-handed was awkward, b
ut he managed. He broke the bread, bit the sausage in half; and passed Max his share. The Jew hesitated but ate. After a while, he pulled a little tin flask from his hip pocket. He yanked out the cork, gave the flask to Jager for the first swig. Vodka ran down his throat like fire.
