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“I don’t know, not exactly,” Anielewicz answered. “I saw six Poles drinking in a tavern. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they do what they came to do. I don’t know if they have any friends along, either.”
“It would be nice if you did know a few things,” Joshua remarked.
Ignoring that, Anielewicz picked his way up the twisting path to the shed. The wooden building looked weathered and sad. The two locks on the door seemed to have seen better days. Anielewicz opened them in the right order. Had he unlocked the top one first, something unpleasant would have happened to him.
He went inside. It was dark and dusty in there; a cobweb caught in his hair. But the interior was very different from the exterior. Inside the rainand sun-faded timbers the shed showed the world was reinforced concrete thick enough to challenge medium artillery. It had firing slits for a German-made machine gun; the MG-42 was at least as good a weapon as any the Lizards manufactured.
Also keeping Anielewicz company was the big crate that housed the bomb. He wondered what those half-dozen Poles would do with it if they got it. Did they think they could put it in their back pocket and walk off with it? That would need to be a big, sturdy pocket, considering the size and weight of the thing.
He supposed he should have been glad the Lizards weren’t attacking. They would have known what they were doing, and would have come in overwhelming force. All the Poles knew was that the Jews had something they wanted. Back in the old days, that was all the Poles had needed to know. Things were different now, even if the nationalists hadn’t figured that out.
“A good gun battle will teach them,” Mordechai muttered under his breath. But that wasn’t the answer, either. With or without a gun battle, the bomb would have to leave Glowno now. That was obvious. One small hitch, though: how could it leave? Everyone would be watching the shed from now on.
Joshua came in, not through the door but up out of a tunnel that ran from somewhere in the middle of the rank second growth. “People are posted,” he said. “We’ll give them more than what they want.”
“Good,” Anielewicz said. Sudden decision crystallized in him. “You stay here. You can handle the detonator if you have to. I’m going to try to make sure you don’t have to.”
Before Joshua could protest, Anielewicz opened the door-it was very heavy, but well balanced and mounted on strong hinges, so it swung easily-and stepped outside again. He stooped and picked up a rather rusty large nail or small spike from the dirt by the shed. Smiling a little, he went down the track and waited.
After about half an hour, his patience was rewarded. Here came the Polish nationalists, all of them with weapons at the ready. Mordechai stepped out into the open where they could see him. He held up the nail or spike so the head and a little of the shank protruded from his fist. “Hello, boys,” he said in friendly tones. “If I drop this, the bomb goes off. That means you want to be careful where you point those guns, doesn’t it?”
One of the Poles crossed himself. Another one said, “Christ, it’s that bastard from the tavern. Damn him, he doesn’t look like a Jew!”
“Life is full of surprises,” Anielewicz said, still bland. “The last surprise you’ll ever get, though, is how high you’ll blow. If we Jews don’t keep the bomb, nobody gets it, and that’s a promise.”
If another band was heading for the shed from a different direction, none of this playacting would matter. But, by the way the Poles talked furiously among themselves, Anielewicz didn’t think that was so.
A tough shook a fist in his direction. “You damned Jews won’t keep this thing forever!”
“Maybe not,” Mordechai answered. He thought it all too likely, in fact. They’d have to move the bomb and hide it again, which wouldn’t be easy-it wasn’t the simplest thing either to move or to conceal. But if they didn’t, they’d face more raids, a stronger one from the Polish nationalists or one from the Lizards or the Nazis or even the Russians. He went on, “But we’ve got it now, and you won’t be the ones who get it away from us.”
A Pole raised a submachine gun and started to point it at him. Two of the fellow’s pals slapped the weapon down again. They believed the nail was a dead-man switch. Slowly, sullenly, they withdrew. One of them shook his fist at Mordechai. Anielewicz made as if to wave with the hand holding the nail. That got all the Poles moving faster.
He allowed himself a sigh of relief. This raid had fizzled. He owed Nesseref a big thank-you for getting him worried about Glowno. He wondered if he’d ever be able to explain that to her. He doubted it. Too bad, he thought.
Vyacheslav Molotov looked at his leading advisors. “Comrades, the Lizards have shown us a weakness we did not previously know they possessed. The question before us is, how can we most effectively exploit it?”
“It is not a military weakness, not in the strict sense of the words,” Georgi Zhukov observed. “I wish it were, but it is not.”
“Why do you say that, Georgi Konstantinovich?” Molotov asked.
“Because the Lizards’ military personnel are all males,” the Soviet marshal answered. “A ginger bomb at a front would not send them into a mating frenzy, as there would be no females close by to incite.”
Lavrenti Beria smiled. “Against the Lizards, ginger is not a military weapon-I agree with Georgi Konstantinovich. Rather, it is a weapon of terror, a weapon of subversion. I look forward to using it.”
Of course you do, Molotov thought. Is that the smile you wear when you do dreadful things to a young girl? He forced his mind back to the meeting. And of course you agree with Zhukov. If ginger is a weapon of subversion, it is a weapon for the NKVD, not the Red Army. Zhukov was careless, to renounce it so fast.
He turned to the foreign commissar. “Has anyone learned who fired the missiles at the Lizards’ Australian colony, Andrei Andreyevich?”
Gromyko sipped from a glass of sweet tea before shaking his head. “No, Comrade General Secretary, not with certainty-or, if the Lizards know, they are holding the information tight against their chests.”
“Lavrenti Pavlovich?” Molotov asked. Beria had channels Gromyko lacked.
But the chief of the NKVD shook his bald head. “Too many candidates. We did not do it; I know that. But the Nazis might have. The Americans might. And this is a more difficult problem than the massacre of the ships from the colonization fleet in orbit, because the British or the Japanese might also have done it.”
“In a way, I am glad we did not do it,” Molotov said. His colleagues nodded. All of them, even Beria, were at bottom prudes. Beria, Molotov s
uspected, got some of his vicious pleasure because of the strength of the rules he was breaking.
As Hitler had before him, Himmler made loud noises about the high moral tone of the Greater German Reich. Would that keep him from doing whatever he could to advance his interests? Molotov didn’t believe it for a minute. The Americans and British were decadent capitalists, so they would have few moral scruples. And the Japanese Empire had never shown scruples of any sort. Sure enough, the field was wide open.
Zhukov said, “For myself, I am sorry we did not think of it.” A leer spread over his broad peasant face. “I would have paid money to watch all the Lizards screwing their heads off. Serves them right for laughing at us for so long.”
Gromyko took another sip from his glass of tea. “It does disrupt them, as Lavrenti Pavlovich has said. But I wish whoever had this idea would have saved it till a critical moment instead of using it to make a nuisance of himself and no more.”
“Spoken like a good pragmatist,” Molotov said: high praise from him. He turned to Beria and Zhukov. “Would the wreckage from the missiles have given the Lizards some clues as to who did this?”
“Comrade General Secretary, anyone who would launch his own missiles at the Lizards is such a fool, he would deserve to get caught,” Beria said.
“I agree,” Zhukov said, not sounding happy about agreeing with Beria on anything. “But my colleagues in the Red Navy tell me it would not be so easy to fire a mongrel missile from a submarine. If anything went wrong, the missile might explode in its launch tube, which would destroy the ship.”
“Boat,” Gromyko said. “Submarines are called boats.”
“Submarines are toys for the devil’s grandson,” Zhukov retorted. He muttered something else. Molotov’s hearing wasn’t what it had been; he didn’t catch all of it. He did catch boats and damned civilians and a couple of new references to Satan’s near relations.
Gromyko might have heard all of Zhukov’s bad-tempered tirade, or he might have heard none of it. If he had heard, his face didn’t know about it. He said, “On the basis of geography, the Japanese are likeliest to be guilty.”
