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“You’re planning to go down there again, and you want me along?” the panzer colonel asked. “I’d stick out like a sore thumb-not just my looks, mind you, but I don’t speak much Italian.”
But Skorzeny shook his massive head. “Not Italy. The Lizards are messing about on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, over in Croatia. I have trouble stomaching Ante Pavelic, but he’s an ally, and we don’t want the Lizards getting a toehold over there. You follow so far?”
“The strategy, yes.” Jager didn’t say that he marveled at an SS man’s having trouble stomaching anything. Word had trickled through the Wehrmacht that the Croat allies, puppets, whatever you wanted to call them, took their fascism-to say nothing of their blood feuds-very seriously indeed. Maybe Skorzeny s admission was proof of that Jager went on, “I still don’t see what it has to do with me, though.”
Skorzeny looked like a fisherman trying out a new lure. “Suppose I were to tell you-and I can, because it’s true-the main Lizard base in Croatia is just outside Split. What would that mean to you?”
“Diocletian’s palace,” Jager answered without a moment’s hesitation. “I even visited there once, on holiday eight or ten years ago. Hell of an impressive building even after better than sixteen hundred years.”
I know you visited, the report you wrote probably went into the operational planning for Operation Strafgericht. Strafgericht indeed; we punished the Yugoslavs properly for ducking out of their alliance with us. But that’s by the way. What counts is that you know the area, and not just from that visit but from study as well. That’s why I say you could be very useful to me.”
“You’re not planning on blowing up the palace, are you?” Jager asked with sudden anxiety Monuments suffered in wartime; that couldn’t be helped. He’d seen enough Russian churches in flames during Barbarossa, but a Russian church didn’t carry the same weight for him as a Roman Emperor’s palace.
“I will if I have to,” Skorzeny said. “I understand what you’re saying, Jager, but if you’re going to let that kind of attitude hold you back, then I’ve made a mistake and you’re the wrong fellow for the job.”
“I may be anyhow. I’ve got a regiment waiting for me south of Belfort, remember.”
“You’re a good panzer man, Jager, but you’re not a genius panzer man,” Skorzeny said. “The regiment will do well enough under someone else. For me, though, your special knowledge would truly come in handy. Do I tempt you, or not?”
Jager rubbed his chin. He had no doubt Skorzeny could cut through the chain of command and get him reassigned: he’d pulled off enough coups for the brass to listen to him. The question was, did he want to go on fighting the same old war himself or try something new?
“Buy me another schnapps,” he said, to Skorzeny.
The SS colonel grinned. “You want me to get you drunk first, so you can say you didn’t know what I was doing when I had my way with you? All right, Jager, I’ll play.” He strode to the bar.
Lieutenant General Kurt Chill turned a sardonic eye on his Soviet opposite numbers-or maybe, George Bagnall thought, it was just the effect the torches that blazed in the Pskov Krom created. But no, the general’s German was sardonic, too: “I trust, gentlemen, we can create a united front for the defense of Pleskau? This would have been desirable before, but cooperation has unfortunately proved limited.”
The two Russian partisan leaders, Nikolai Vasiliev and Aleksandr German, stirred in their seats. Aleksandr German spoke Yiddish as well as Russian, and so followed Chill’s words well enough. He said, “Call our city by its proper name, not the one you Nazis hung on it. Cooperation? Ha! You at least had that much courtesy before.”
Bagnall, whose German was imperfect, frowned as he tried to keep track of the Jewish partisan leader’s Yiddish. Vasiliev had no Yiddish or German; he had to wait until an interpreter finished murmuring in his ear. Then he boomed “Da!” and followed it up with a spate of incomprehensible Russian.
The interpreter performed his office: “Brigadier Vasiliev also rejects the use of the term ‘united front.’ It is properly applied to unions of progressive organizations, not associations with reactionary causes.”
Beside Bagnall, Jerome Jones whistled under his breath. “He shaded that translation. ‘Fascist jackals’ is really what Vasiliev called the Nazis.”
“Why does this not surprise me?” Bagnall whispered back. “If you want to know what I think, that they’ve come back to calling each other names instead of trying to kill each other is progress.”
“Something to that,” Jones said.
He started to add more, but Chill was speaking again: “If we do not join together now, whatever the name of that union may be, what we call this city will matter no more. The Lizards will give it their own name.”
“And how do we stop that?” As usual, German got his comment in a beat ahead of Vasiliev.
The Russian partisan leader amplified what his comrade had said: “Yes, how do we dare put our men on the same firing line as yours without fearing they’ll be shot in the back?”
“The same way I dare put Wehrmacht men into line alongside yours,” Chill said: “by remembering the enemy is worse. As for being shot in the back, how many Red Army units went into action with NKVD men behind them to make sure they were properly heroic?”
“Not our partisans” German said. Then he fell silent, and Vasiliev had nothing to add, from which Bagnall inferred General Chill had scored a point.
Chill folded his arms across his chest. “Does either of you gentlemen propose to take overall command of the defenses of Pleskau-excuse me, Pskov?”
Aleksandr German and Vasiliev looked at each other. Neither seemed overjoyed at the prospect of doing as Chill had suggested. In their valenki, Bagnall wouldn’t have been overjoyed either. Conducting hit-and-run raids from the forest wasn’t the same as fighting a standup campaign. The partisans knew well how to make nuisances of themselves. They also had to be uneasily aware that partisan warfare hadn’t kept the Germans from Pskov or driven them out of it.
Finally Vasiliev said, “Nyet.” He went on through his interpreter. “You are best suited to lead the defense provided you do it so that you are defending the town and the people and the Soviet fighters in the area as well as your own Nazis.”
“If I defend the area, I defend all of it, or as much as I can with the men and resources I have available,” Chill answered. “This also means that if I give an order to one of your units, I expect it to be obeyed.”
“Certainly,” Vasiliev answered, “so long as the unit’s commander and political commissar judge the order to be in the best interest of the cause as a whole, not just to the advantage of you Germans.”
“That is not good enough,” Chill replied coldly. “They must take the overall well-being, as their governing assumption, and obey whether they see the need or not. One of the reasons for having an overall commander is to have a man in a position where he can see things his subordinates do not.”
“Nyet,” Vasiliev said again. Aleksandr German echoed him.
“Oh, bugger, here we go again,” Bagnall whispered to Jerome Jones. The radarman nodded. Bagnall went on, “We’ve got to do something, before we go through another round of the idiocy that had the Bolshies and Nazis blazing away at each other a few weeks ago. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy getting stuck between them again.”
“Nor I,” Jones whispered back. “If that’s what the ground-pounders call war, thank God for the RAF, is all I have to say.”
“You get no arguments from me,” Bagnall said. “Remember, I’d already found that out. You weren’t along for the raid on the Lizard base south of here.” They thought you were too valuable to risk he thought without much rancor. Ken and poor dead Alf and I, we were expendable, but not you-you know your radars too well.
As if thinking along similar lines, Jones answered, “I tried to come along. The bloody Russians wouldn’t let me.”
“Did you? I didn’t know t
hat.” Bagnall’s opinion of Jones went up a peg. To volunteer to get shot at when you didn’t have to took something special.
As most Englishmen would, Jones brushed that aside. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. We have to worry about now, as you said.” He got up and said loudly, “Tovarishchi!” Even Bagnal knew that one-it meant Comrades! Jones went on, in Russian and then in German, “If we want to hand Pskov to the Lizards on a silver platter, we can go on just as we are now.”
“Yes? And so?” Kurt Chill asked. “What is your solution? Shall we all place ourselves under your command?” His smile was hard and bright and sharp, like a shark’s.
Jones turned pale and sat down in a hurry. “I’ve got a picture of that, I do, bloody generals kowtowing to a radarman. Not flipping likely.”
