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“Not even a little bit,” Jager said fervently. He looked around at the wreckage-and the carnage. “They’re tougher than I thought they were.”
“They can fight.” Skorzeny looked around. If the devastation bothered him, he didn’t show it. “We found out the Russians were tougher than we thought, too, but we would have licked them in the end.” Nothing seemed to get him down. Give him a military job, no matter how bizarre or impossible it seemed, and he’d go out and do it.
A Croat aimed his rifle at a Lizard prisoner. “Halt!” Jager shouted as loud as he could-if the Croat understood any German, that would be it.
“Stop that!” Skorzeny echoed, even louder than Jager. “What the bleeding hell do you think you’re doing, you shitheaded syphilitic cretinous puddle of dog puke?”
The Croat understood German, all right. He swung his rifle away from the frightened, cringing Lizard-and halfway toward Skorzeny. “I get rid of this thing,” he said. “Maybe I get rid of you first.”
Most of the men on the battered streets, most of the men who had done the fighting in Split, were Croats, not Germans. A lot of them started drifting over toward Skorzeny and Jager. They didn’t quite aim their weapons at the German officers, but they had them ready. Among them was Captain Petrovic. He looked as ready to get rid of the Germans as any of his troops.
Jager said, “Shooting Lizards is wasteful. They know so much that we don’t. Better to keep them alive and squeeze it out of them.”
The Croat with the rifle spat. “This I care for what they know. I know I enjoy killing this one, so I do it.”
“If you kill that Lizard, I’ll kill you,” Skorzeny said, as casually as if he were sitting over coffee with the Croat. “If you try to kill me, I’ll kill you. Colonel Jager is right, and you damn well know it.”
The Croat’s scowl got blacker yet. He did not move his rifle another centimeter in Skorzeny’s direction, though. Jager gestured to the Lizard: a peremptory come-here. The Lizard skittered over to stand beside him.
“Good,” Skorzeny said softly. He turned to Petrovic, raised his voice: “Order your men to round up the rest of the Lizards and bring them here. From what I’ve heard, we should have twenty or so who surrendered, plus about as many wounded. I want them all there-immediately. They’re as big a haul as this whole town.”
“You want,” Petrovic said coldly. “So what? This is the Independent State of Croatia, not Germany. I give orders here, not you. What do you do if I tell you no?”
“Shoot you,” Skorzeny answered. “If you think I can’t take you out along with your cheerful friend over there”-he jerked his chin at the Croat who had threatened the Lizard-“before your bully boys bring me down, you’re welcome to find out if you’re right.”
Petrovic was no coward. Had he been a coward, he wouldn’t have thrown himself into the middle of the fighting that had just ended. Skorzeny stood, almost at ease, waiting for him to do whatever he would do. Jager did his best to match the SS man’s show of confidence. Matching his gall was something else again.
After a long, long pause, Petrovic barked orders in Serbo-Croatian. One of his men shouted a protest. Petrovic screamed abuse at him. Jager hadn’t picked up much of the local language, but the invective sounded impressive as hell.
The Croats straggled away. A few minutes later, they started coming back with Lizard prisoners, first the males who had given up as the fighting ebbed and then, on makeshift litters, the crudely bandaged ones wounds had forced out of combat. Their sounds of pain were unpleasantly close to the ones men made.
“I wasn’t sure you’d get away with that,” Jager murmured to Skorzeny.
“You have to make it personal,” Skorzeny whispered back. “These bastards take everything personally. I just played their game with them, and I won.” His smile was smug as he added one final word: “Again.”
Georg Schultz said, “I figured I’d get into Moscow one way or another, but I never guessed what those ways would be-first you flew me in, and now I’m retreating into it.”
“It isn’t funny.” Ludmila Gorbunova tore a chunk of black bread with her teeth. Someone handed her a glass of ersatz tea. She gulped it down. Someone else gave her a bowl of shchi. She gulped the cabbage soup, too. While she refueled herself, groundcrew men took care of her aircraft, pouring petrol into it, loading on light bombs, and stowing the belts of machine-gun ammunition Schultz had filled.
“I never said it was funny,” the German said. He looked worn unto death, his skin gray rather than fair, his hair and beard unkempt, grease on his face and tunic-no one had much chance to wash these days. Purple pouches lay under his eyes.
Ludmila was sure she was no more prepossessing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had more than a couple of hours of sleep at a stretch. Even before the Kaluga line began to unravel, she’d been desperately overtaxed. Since then…
The cry was buy time. When the Germans neared Moscow in 1941, old men, boys, and tens of thousands of women had dug trenches and antitank obstacles to slow their progress. They were out again. How much good their bathers would do against the Lizards when stronger ones had already failed was questionable, but the Soviet capital would not fall without as much of a fight as the Soviet people could put up.
“Ready, Comrade Pilot,” one of the groundcrew men shouted.
Ready or not, Ludmila put down the bowl of shchi-thin, watery stuff, without ham or salami, and without enough cabbage, too-and got up. She climbed wearily into the U-2 biplane. Georg Schultz said, “I hope you come back. I hope we’re still here when you come back.”
Nikifor Sholudenko walked up just in time to hear the panzer-gunner-turned-mechanic say that. The NKVD man bristled. “The penalty for defeatist talk is death,” he said.
Schultz rounded on him. “What’s the penalty for killing the only decent technician this base has?” he retorted. “You do that, you do more to make your side lose than I do by talking.”
“This may be true,” Sholudenko said, “but there is no fixed sentence for it.” His hand fell to the Tokarev pistol he wore on his hip.
Ludmila knew eac
h of them wanted the other dead. Loudly, she said, “Spin my prop, one of you. Save your war with each other until after we’ve held off the Lizards.” If we hold off the Lizards, she added to herself. Had she said that aloud, she wondered whether Sholudenko would have come down on her for defeatism. Probably not. He didn’t want to see her dead-only naked.
The NKVD man and the ex-Wehrmacht sergeant both sprang toward the front of the Kukuruznik Schultz got there first. When he yanked at the prop, Sholudenko had to back way; walking into a spinning prop blade would kill you as surely as a pistol, and a lot more messily.
Buzz! The prop caught; the five-cylinder radial engine spat out acrid exhaust fumes. Ludmila released the brake. The U-2 bounded over the rough airstrip (not really a strip at all, just a stretch of field), picking up speed. Ludmila gave it more throttle, eased the stick back. The ugly little biplane clawed its way into the air.
Even in flight, the U-2 did not go from duckling to swan. Yet, as a mosquito will bite and escape where a horsefly gets noticed and swatted, Kukuruzniks came back from missions more often than any other Soviet planes.
Not much was left of Kaluga. “Ludmila flew over the outskirts of the industrial town. The Germans had wrecked part of when they took it in their drive on Moscow in fall 1941, and the Russians had wrecked more when they took it back later the same year. Whatever they’d left standing, the Lizards had knocked down over the last couple of weeks.
The front lay north of Kaluga these days. The Lizards had cleared a few of the north-south streets through the town so they could move supplies forward. Lorries, some of their manufacture, others captured from the Nazis or the Soviets (some of those Russian-made, others American) rolled along, as if no enemies were to be found for a thousand kilometers.
I may not be much of an enemy, but I’m the best the Soviet Union has here, Ludmila thought. She worked her flaps and rudder, heeled the U-2 over into an attack run on the lorry column she’d spotted.
