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When she came out of the tunnels, she blinked like a mole suddenly in daylight as she replaced the grass-covered netting that concealed the entrance. As Colonel Karpov had said, a high-wheeledpanje wagon waited there, the driver in the baggy blouse, trousers, and boots of themuzhik, the horse making the most of the moment by pulling up weeds.
The wagon carried a load of straw. When Georg Schultz sat up in it, he looked like a scarecrow, although Ludmila had never seen a scarecrow with a coppery beard. He was dressed in his oldWehrmacht tunic and Red Army trousers; he didn’t have any civilian clothes this side of wherever in Germany he came from.
He grinned at her. “Come on back here with me,liebchen,” he said in his mixture of Russian and German.
“One minute.” She rummaged in her pack until she found the Tokarev automatic pistol. She belted it on, then climbed into the wagon. “You never listen to me when I tell you to keep your hands where they belong. Maybe you will listen to this.”
“Maybe.” He was still grinning. He’d faced worse things than pistols. “And maybe not.”
The driver twitched the reins. The horse let out a resentful snort, raised its head, and ambled off toward Moscow. The driver whistled something from Mussorgsky-after a moment, Ludmila recognized it as “The Great Gate of Kiev.” She smiled at the reference, no matter how oblique, to her hometown. But the smile quickly faded. Kiev had passed from the Nazis’ hands straight into those of the Lizards.
Although they moved ever farther from the front line, the countryside showed the scars of war. Bombs had cratered the dirt road that ran northeast toward Moscow; every couple of hundred meters, it seemed, thepanje wagon had to rattle off onto the verge.
Georg Schultz sat up again, spilling straw in all directions. “These stinking dirt roads played hell with us, all through Russia. The map would say we were coming up to a highway, and it’d either be dust and dirt like this or mud when it rained. Didn’t seem fair. You damn Russians were so backwards, it ended up helping you.”
The driver didn’t move a muscle; he just kept driving. In spite of that, Ludmila would have bet he knew German. If he was from the NKVD, he’d have more talents than his rough-hewn exterior revealed.
Every so often, they’d pass the dead carcasses of tanks rocketed from the air by the Lizards before they ever reached the front. Some had been there long enough to start rusting. Most had their engine compartments and turret hatches open: the Soviets had salvaged whatever they could from the wreckage.
Even as scrap metal, the T-34s looked formidable. Pointing to one, Ludmila asked with no small pride, “And what did you think of those when you were up against them, Comrade Panzer Gunner?”
“Nasty buggers,” Schultz answered promptly, ignoring the ironic form of address. “Good armor, good gun, good engine, good tracks-all better than anything we had, probably. The gunsight, not so good. Not the two-man turret, either-the commander’s too busy helping the gunner to command the panzer, and that’s his proper job. He should have a cupola, too. And you need more panzers with wireless sets. Not having them hurt your tactics, and they weren’t that great to begin with.”
Now Ludmila hoped the driver was listening. She’d been aiming to twit the German tankman; she hadn’t expected such a serious, thoughtful answer. Being a Nazi didn’t automatically make a man a fool, no matter what propaganda claimed.
The journey in to Moscow took two days. They spent the first night in a stand of trees well off the road. The Lizards still flew by at night, smashing up whatever they could find.
Moscow, when they finally reached it, made Ludmila gasp in dismay. She’d last been there the winter before, after she’d flown Molotov to Germany. The Soviet capital had taken a beating then. Now…
Now it seemed that every building possibly large enough to contain a factory had been pounded flat. A couple of the onion domes of the Kremlin and St. Basil’s had crumpled. Walls everywhere were streaked with soot; the faint odor of wet, stale smoke hung in the air.
But people hadn’t given up.Babushkas sold apples and cabbages and beets on street corners. Soldiers carrying submachine guns tramped purposefully along. Horse-drawn wagons, some small like the one in which Ludmila rode, others pulled by straining teams, rattled and clattered. No guessing what they held, not with tarpaulins lashed down tight over their beds. If the Lizards couldn’t see what was in them, they wouldn’t know what to bomb. Flies droned around lumps of horse dung.
The driver knew which bridge over the Moscow River was in good enough repair to get them up to the Kremlin, and which parts of the battered heart of Moscow-of the Soviet Union-were still beating. He pulled thepanje wagon up in front of one of those parts, stuck a feed bag on the horse’s head, and said, “I am to escort you to Colonel Lidov.” But for the snatches of whistling he’d let out from time to time, that was almost the first sound he’d made since he set out from the air base.
Some of the walls in the corridor were cracked, but the electric lights worked. Off in the distance, a petrol-fired generator chugged away to keep the lightbulbs shining. “Wishwe had electricity,” Schultz muttered under his breath.
The corridor was not the one down which Ludmila had gone on her earlier meeting with Boris Lidov; she wondered if that part of the Kremlin still stood. The wagon driver opened a door, peered inside, beckoned to her and to Georg Schultz. “He will see you.”
Ludmila’s heart pounded in her chest, as if she were about to fly a combat mission. She knew she had reason to be nervous; the NKVD could kill you as readily, and with as little remorse, as the Germans or the Lizards. And Lidov had made plain what he thought of her after she got back from Germany. She might have gone to agulag then, rather than back to her unit.
The NKVD colonel (Ludmila wondered if his promotion sprang from ability or simply survival) looked up from a paper-strewn desk. She started to report to him in proper military form, but Schultz beat her to the punch, saying breezily, “How goes it with you, Boris, you scrawny old prune-faced bastard?”
Staring, Ludmila waited for the sky to fall. It wasn’t that the description didn’t fit; it did, like a glove. But to say what you thought of an NKVD colonel, right to his prune face… Maybe he didn’t follow German.
He did. Fixing Schultz with a fishy stare, he answered in German much better than Ludmila’s: “Just because Otto Skorzeny could get away with speaking to me so, Sergeant, does not mean you can. He was more valuable than you are, and he was not under Soviet discipline. You, on the other hand-” He let that hang, perhaps to give Schultz the chance to paint horrid pictures in his own mind.
It didn’t work. Schultz said, “Listen, I was one of the men you sent on the raid that gave you people the metal for your bomb. If that doesn’t buy me the right to speak my mind, what does?”
“Nothing,” Lidov said coldly.
Ludmila spoke up before Schultz got himself shot or sent to a camp, and her along with him: “Comrade Colonel, for what mission have you summoned the two of us away from the front line?”
Lidov’s look suggested he’d forgotten she was there, and utterly forgotten he’d ordered the two of them to Moscow for any specific reason. After a moment, he collected himself and even laughed a little. That amazed Ludmila, who hadn’t suspected he could. Then he explained, “Curiously enough, it has to do with Soviet-German friendship and cooperation.” He’d answered Ludmila in Russian; he translated the reply into German for Schultz’s benefit.
The panzer gunner laughed, too. “Till the Lizards came, I was giving you cooperation, all right, fifty millimeters at a time.”
“What are we to do, Comrade Colonel?” Ludmila asked hastily. Lidov had warned Georg Schultz twice. Even once would have been surprising. Thinking he’d forbear three times running was asking for a miracle, and Ludmila, a good product of the Soviet educational system, did not believe in miracles.
Lidov’s chair squeaked as he turned in it to point to a map pinned to the rough plaster on the side of the wall. “Here by the lake
-do you see it? — is the city of Pskov. It is still in the hands of mankind, although threatened by the Lizards. Some of the defenders areWehrmacht troops, others partisan members of the Red Army.” He paused and pursed his lips. “Some friction in the defense has resulted from this.”
“You mean they’re shooting at each other, don’t you?” Schultz asked. Ludmila had wondered if he was too naive to see what lay beneath propaganda, but he proved he wasn’t. Gobbels probably used the same techniques as his Soviet counterparts, which would have sensitized Schultz to them.
“Not at present,” Lidov said primly. “Nonetheless, examples of cooperation might prove to have a valuable effect there. The two of you have done an admirable job of working together, by all the reports that have reached me.”
“We haven’t worked together all that close,” Schultz said with a sidelong glance at Ludmila. “Not as close as I’d like.”
