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“Fair young Tatiana is quite enough trouble all on her own,” Jones said. “She and Alcibiades, they’d deserve each other.”
“Here’s one fast clue to your feelings, for starters,” Bagnall said: “If you only want to have anything to do with your possibly beloved when the two of you are naked between the sheets, that should tell you something about your state of mind.”
“So it should.” The radarman looked thoughtful. “Not as simple as that, I’m afraid; I wish to heaven it were. But I like being around her, whether we’re”-he coughed-“or not. It’s rather like setting up a tent next to a tiger’s lair: you never know what will happen next, but it’s apt to be something exciting.”
“And you’re liable to end up as thehors d’oeuvres,” Embry put in.
Bagnall waved the pilot to silence. “How do you think she feels about you, Jones?” he asked.
Jerome Jones’ face furrowed with thought. “I am of the opinion her fidelity leaves something to be desired,” he said, to which Bagnall could but nod. Jones went on, “She set her cap for me, not the other way round. This bloody country-I’d be afraid to chat up a girl, because next thing you know, you’d be talking to the NKVD instead.” He shivered. “Some of my university chums, they weren’t just pink, they were red. If any of them had actually seen Russia, that wouldn’t have lasted long, and there’s the God’s truth.”
“You’re certain to be right about that,” Bagnall said. “The same thing has occurred to me, oh, once or twice during our delightful sojourn here. But it’s not to the point now. That centers on the fair Tatiana.”
“I know.” Jones walked on for several paces without continuing.
Bagnall waited for him to say something, anything, that would clarify what he felt, what Tatiana felt, and might even help all of them get out of their present complications without falling into new ones that were worse. He realized that was asking a lot, but he’d never wanted Tatiana to set her sights on him.
After a bit, the radarman said, “I chased a lot of skirt back in England; I don’t think there was a barmaid in any pub I went into whom I didn’t try to chat up. But we all know there’s a deal of difference between chasing it and catching it, don’t we?” He chuckled wryly. “And so, when we got here and I had this gorgeous creature chasing me, it made me feel about ten feet high. And, of course-” He didn’t go on, but his expression was eloquent.
Ken Embry put that expression into words: “When you’re sleeping with a pretty woman, there is a certain natural disinclination to do anything which will result in your not sleeping with her in future.”
“Well, yes,” Jones said, coloring a little. “In her own bloodthirsty way, I think, Tatiana is fond enough of me, too. Speaking a bit of Russian does me no harm there. But she keeps complaining I’m too soft to quite suit her, that she’d like me better if I stuck a knife between my teeth and crawled about through the bushes slitting Lizards’ throats.”
Bagnall nodded. His own rugged masculine charm (if any) hadn’t been what drew Tatiana to him. He knew that perfectly well. Tatiana wanted him because she thought he was good at hurting the Lizards. She hadn’t made any bones about it, either.
Embry said, “With that cast of mind, it’s a miracle she didn’t throw in her lot with a Jerry.”
“If she hadn’t been trying to pot them before the Lizards came, she would have done just that, my guess is,” Jones said. “But she hates them worse than any other Russian I’ve ever seen, and she thinks her own menfolk are a pack of swine. Which left-me. Except nowadays I’m not good enough, either.”
“Maybe I should make a play for Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova,” Bagnall said meditatively. “It’s the easiest way I can think of to get Tatiana out of my hair for good.”
“Except that if she really is out to have you come hell or high water, losing you to Ludmila is liable to endanger that young lady,” Ken Embry said.
“There I have my doubts,” Bagnall said. “Ludmila is not as outwardly ferocious as Tatiana, that I grant you, but she can take care of herself.”
“I should hope so,” Jerome Jones burst out. “How many combat missions has she flown in that rickety little biplane of hers? More than I like to think about, that’s certain. You wouldn’t get me up in the air in one of those things, especially not where people are trying to shoot me down.”
“Amen to that,” Bagnall said. “She doesn’t go any too high in the air, either-leaves herself a target for any bloke on the ground with a rifle.” He knew she would have been a target for worse things than rifle fire had she strayed high enough for radar to pick her up, but the idea of being vulnerable to simple infantry weapons chilled him to the marrow.
“If she can take care of herself, you really should make a play for her,” Embry said. “That would get you out of harm’s way, and might even reconcile Tatiana to Jones here. See what a Leonora Eyles I’m getting to be?” he added, naming the advice columnist forWomen’s Own magazine.
“This ointment does have one fly in it,” Jerome Jones said, “namely, the Jerry who flew into Pskov with our intrepid pilot: Schultz, that’s what he’s called. Have you never seen him casting sheep’s eyes at her?”
“I’ve seen that, yes,” Bagnall said, “but I’ve never seen Ludmila casting any back his way. He’s a rugged specimen, but I’m not afraid of him.” He rubbed his chin. “I’d not care to put us in a bad odor with the Germans, either, though. If we’re not seen to be honest brokers between the Nazis and the Reds, everything we’ve accomplished goes up in smoke-and so, very likely, does Pskov.”
“Bloody hell of a thing,” Ken Embry remarked, “when you can’t even make a play for a pretty girl for fear of causing an international incident.”
“International incidents be damned,” Bagnall said. “I don’t care about that aspect of it at all. But if making a play for a pretty girl will get me killed and this town blown up around my ears, that does make me thoughtful, I admit.”
“Nice to know something can,” Embry said with a grin.
South of Pskov, antiaircraft guns began to hammer. A moment later, cannon inside the city started throwing shells into the air. With training instilled when theLuftwaffe had been pounding England, the three RAF men leaped into the nearest hole in the ground: a large bomb crater.
The crater was muddy at the bottom, but Bagnall didn’t care about that, not when a couple of Lizard jets were screaming overhead, low enough that their banshee wail all but deafened him. As he buried his face in the cool, wet dirt, he tried to remember what sort of targets were nearby. In a mechanized war, such matters determined who lived and who died.
Bombs raining down made the ground shake. Bagnall had never experienced an earthquake, but was of the opinion that being bombed made a satisfactory substitute.
Still pursued by shells, the Lizard fighter-bombers streaked away to the north. Every so often, the antiaircraft gunners got lucky and brought down a Lizard plane. They expended a great whacking lot of shells between kills, though.
Shrapnel pattered down like hot, j
agged hailstones. Bagnall wished for a tin hat. Shrapnel wouldn’t tear you into gory rags the way bomb fragments did; it wasn’t going fast enough. But a big chunk could fracture your skull or do other unpleasant things to the one and only wonderful and precious body you ever got.
When the AA guns fell silent and the rain of machined brass and steel stopped, Ken Embry got to his feet and began brushing dirt and muck from his clothes. The other two Englishmen followed rather more slowly.
“All in a day’s work,” Embry said. “Shall we brew up some of the Russians’ alleged tea when we get back to our digs?”
“Why not?” Bagnall answered. His heart was still pounding in animal response to the bombing, but his mind remained untroubled and collected. As Embry had said, it was all in a day’s work-and that struck Bagnall as the most damning indictment of all.
12
Rance Auerbach hated everything about Lamar, Colorado. It reminded him all too vividly of the medium-small west Texas town where he’d grown up, and which he’d left as soon as he could. That would have been bad enough all by itself. But just being in Lamar also reminded him the Lizards had thrown him and his men out of Lakin, Kansas.
That being so, he sneered at everything pertaining to Lamar. The town was dirtier than it had been when he and his force sallied against Lakin. It smelled of horse manure. Normally, that smell bothered him not in the least: he was a cavalryman, after all. There wasn’t a town in the United States that didn’t smell of horse manure nowadays, either. Auerbach was determined not to let facts get between him and his anger.
One thing Lamar did boast was a goodly number of watering holes. What they served these days was moonshine, liquor so raw it would have made better disinfectant than booze. No one who drank it complained, not with nothing better available.
Auerbach would not have imagined a small town like Lamar could hold surprises, but he was proved wrong about that. Coming out of one of the local watering holes was a cavalry trooper who filled a uniform in ways the Quartermaster General’s Office never would have imagined before the Lizards landed.
