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“Bugger.” That put a crimp in Bagnall’s scheme, but only for a moment. He spoke up in a loud voice: “Gentlemen, please!” If nothing else, he succeeded in distracting the Germans and partisans from the bead they were drawing on each other. Everyone stared at him instead. He said, “I think I can find a way out of this dispute.”
Grim faces defied him to do it. Trouble was, he realized suddenly, the Germans and Russians really wanted to have a go at each other. In English, Kurt Chill said, “Enlighten us, then.”
“I’ll do my best,” Bagnall answered. “There’s only the one radar, and no help for that. If you hijack it, word will get back to Moscow-and to London. Cooperation between Germany and her former foes will be hampered, and the Lizards will likely gain more from that than the Luftwaffe could from the radar. Is this so, or not?”
“It may be,” Chill said. “I do not think, though, there is much cooperation now, when you give the Russians and not us this set.” Captain Borcke nodded emphatically at that.
There was much truth in what the German general said. Bagnall was anything but happy about sharing secrets with the Nazis, and his attitude reflected that of British leaders from Churchill on down. But setting the Wehrmacht and the Red Army back at each other’s throats wasn’t what anyone had had in mind, either.
The flight engineer said, “How is this, then? The radar itself and the manuals go on toward Moscow as planned. But before they do”-he sighed-“you make copies of the manuals and send them to Berlin.”
“Copies?” Chill said. “By photograph?”
“If you have that kind of equipment here, yes.” Bagnall had been thinking of doing the job by hand; Pskov struck him as a burnt-out backwater town. But who could say what sort of gear the division intelligence unit of the 122nd Infantry-or whatever other units were in the area-had available?
“I’m not sure the higher-ups back home would approve, but they didn’t anticipate this situation,” Ken Embry murmured. “As for me, I’d say you’ve managed to saw the baby in half. King Solomon would be proud.”
“I hope so,” Bagnall said.
Sergei Morozkin was still translating his suggestion for the partisan leaders. When he finished, Vasiliev turned to Aleksandr German and said with heavy humor, “Nu Sasha?” It had to be more Yiddish-Bagnall had heard that word from David Goldfarb.
Aleksandr German peered through his spectacles at Chill the German. Having Goldfarb in the aircrew for a while had made Bagnall more aware of what the Nazis had done to Eastern European Jews than he otherwise would have been. He wondered what went on behind German’s poker face, how much hatred seethed there. The partisan did not let on. After a while, he sighed and spoke one word: “Da.”
“We shall do this, then.” If Chill was enthusiastic about Bagnall’s plan, he hid it very well. But it gave him most of what he wanted, and kept alive the fragile truce around Pskov.
As if to underline how important that was, Lizard jets streaked overhead. When bombs began to fall, Bagnall felt something near panic: a hit anywhere close by would bring all the stones of the Krom down on his head.
Through the fading wail of the Lizards’ engines and the ground-shaking crash of the bombs came the rattle of what sounded like every rifle and submachine gun in the world going off at once. Pskov’s defenders, Nazis and Communists alike, did their best to knock down the Lizards’ planes.
As usual, their best was not good enough. Bagnall listened hopefully for the rending crash that would have meant a fighter-bomber destroyed, but it never came. He also listened for the roar that would warn of a second wave of attackers. That didn’t come, either.
“Anyone would think that flying more than a thousand miles would take us out of the bloody blitz,” Alf Whyte complained.
“They called it a world war even before the Lizards came,” Embry said.
Nikolai Vasiliev shouted something at Morozkin. Instead of translating it, he hurried away to return a few minutes later with a tray full of bottles and glasses. “We drink to this-how you say? — agreement,” he said.
He was pouring man-sized slugs of vodka for everyone when a partisan burst in, shouting in Russian. “Uh-oh,” Jerome Jones said. “I didn’t catch all of that, but I didn’t care for what I understood.”
Morozkin turned to the RAF air crew. “I have-bad news. Those-how you say? — Lizards, they bomb your plane. Is wreck and ruin-is that what you say?”
“That’s what we say,” Embry answered dully.
“Nichevo, tovarishchi,” Morozkin said.
He didn’t translate that, maybe because it was so completely Russian that doing so never occurred to him. “What did he say?” Bagnall demanded of Jerome Jones.
“ ‘It can’t be helped, comrades’-something like that,” the radarman answered. “ ‘There’s nothing to be done about it,’ might be a better rendering.”
Bagnall didn’t care a pin for fine points of translation. “We’re stuck here in bloody Pskov and there’s bloody nothing to be done about it?” he burst out, his voice rising to a shout. “Nichevo,” Jones said.
Science Hall was a splendid structure, a three-story red brick building on the northwest corner of the University of Denver campus. It housed the university’s chemistry and physics departments, and would have made a fine home for the transplanted Metallurgical Laboratory from the University of Chicago. Jens Larssen admired the facility intensely.
There was only one problem: he had no idea when the rest of the Met Lab team would show up.
“All dressed up with no place to go,” he muttered to himself as he stalked down a third-floor corridor. From the north-facing window at the end of that corridor, he could see the Platte River snaking its way south and east through town, and beyond it the state capitol and other tall buildings of the civic center. Denver was a pretty place, snow still on the ground here and there, the air almost achingly clear. Jens delighted in it not at all.
Everything had gone so perfectly. He might as well have been riding the train in those dear, vanished pre-Lizard days. He wasn’t bombed, he wasn’t strafed, he had a lower Pullman berth more comfortable than any bed he’d slept in for months. He had heat on the train and electricity; the only hint there was a war on was the bl
ackout curtain on the window and a sign taped alongside it: USE IT. IT’S your NECK.
An Army major had met him when the train pulled into Union Station, had taken him out to Lowry Field east of town, had arranged a room for him at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. He’d almost balked at that-he was no bachelor. But Barbara wasn’t with him, so he’d gone along.
“Stupid,” he said aloud. Going along even once had got him tangled up again in the spiderweb of military routine. He’d had a taste of that in Indiana under George Patton. The local commanders were less flamboyant than Patton, but no less inflexible.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Larssen, but that will not be permitted,” a bird colonel named Hexham had said. The colonel hadn’t sounded sorry, not one bit. By that he meant Larssen’s going out of town to find out where the rest of the Met Lab team was.
“But why?” Jens had howled, pacing the colonel’s office like a newly caged wolf. “Without the other people, without the equipment they have with them, I’m not much good to you by myself.”
“Dr. Larssen, you are a nuclear physicist working on a highly classified project,” Colonel Hexham had answered. He’d kept his voice low, reasonable; Jens supposed he’d got on the fellow’s nerves as well as the other way round. “We cannot let you go gallivanting off just as you please. And if disaster befalls your colleagues, who better than you to reconstruct the project?”
Larssen hadn’t laughed in his face, but he’d come close. Reconstruct the work of several Nobel laureates-by himself? He’d have to be Superman, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. But there was just enough truth in it-he’d been part of the project, after all-to keep him from taking off on his own.
“Everything is fine,” Hexham had told him. “They’re heading this way; we know that much. We’re delighted you’re here ahead of them. That means you can help get things organized so they’ll be able to hit the ground running when they arrive.”
