Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

To escape the hideous glare, he ducked inside the factory. There, in real shadows, the light seemed more tolerable. Mordechai Anielewicz and Ludmila followed. “What was that stuff you shot us with?” the Jew asked, his voice a whisper.

“The antidote for nerve gas-that’s all I know,” Jager answered. “They issued it to us in case we had to cross areas we’d already saturated while we were fighting the Lizards-or in case the wind shifted when we didn’t expect it to. Skorzeny must have brought along gas grenades, or maybe just bottles full of gas, for all I know. Throw one in, let it break, give yourself a shot while you’re waiting, and then go in and do what you were going to do.”

Anielewicz looked down at the dead body of the sentry. “We have nerve gas now, too, you know,” he said. Jager nodded. Anielewicz scowled. “We’re going to have to be even more careful with it than we have been-and we’ve taken casualties from it.” Jager nodded again. With nerve gas, you couldn’t be too careful.

“Enough of this,” Ludmila said. “Where is the bomb, and how do we get to it and stop Skorzeny without getting killed ourselves?”

Those were good questions. Jager couldn’t have come up with better if he’d thought for a week, and he didn’t have a week to waste thinking. He glanced over to Anielewicz. If anybody had the answers, the Jewish fighting leader did.

Anielewicz pointed into the bowels of the building. “The bomb is there, less than a hundred meters away. See the opening there, behind the overturned desk? The path isn’t straight, but it’s clear. One of you, maybe both of you, should go down it. It’s the only way you’ll get there fast enough to be useful. Me, I set this place up. There’s another way to get to the bomb. I’ll take that-and we see what happens then.”

Jager was used to sending others out to create distractions for him to exploit. Now he and Ludmila were the distraction. He couldn’t argue with that, not when Anielewicz knew the ground and he didn’t. But he knew the people who created distractions were the ones likely to get expended when the shooting started. If his mouth hadn’t already been dry from the antidote, it would have gone that way.

Anielewicz didn’t wait for him and Ludmila to argue. Like any good commander, he took being obeyed for granted. Pointing one last time to the upside-down desk, he slipped away behind a pile of rubble.

“Stay in back of me,” Jager whispered to Ludmila.

“Chivalry is reactionary,” she said. “You have the better weapon. I should lead and draw fire.” In strictly military terms, she was right He’d never thought strictly military terms would apply to the woman he loved. But if he failed here out of love or chivalry or whatever you wanted to call it, he failed altogether. Reluctantly, he waved Ludmila ahead.

She didn’t see the motion, because she’d already started moving forward. He followed, close as he could. As Anielewicz had said, the path wound but was easy enough to use. With his pupils dilated by the nerve gas antidote, he could see exactly where to place each foot to make the least possible noise.

What he thought was about halfway to the bomb, Ludmila stopped in her tracks. She pointed round the corner. Jager came up far enough to see. A Jewish guard lay dead there, one hand still on his rifle. Ever so carefully, Jager and Ludmila stepped over him and moved on.

Up ahead, Jager heard tools clinking on metal, a sound with which he’d become intimately familiar while serving on panzers. Normally, that was a good sound, promising that something broken would soon be fixed. Something broken would soon be fixed now, too. Here, though, the sound of ongoing repair raised the hair at the back of his neck.

He made a mistake then-brushing against some rubble, he knocked over a brick. It fell to the ground with a crash that seemed hideously loud. Jager froze, cursing himself. That’s why you didn’t stay in the infantry, you clumsy son of a whore.

He prayed Skorzeny hadn’t heard the brick. God wasn’t listening. The handicraft noises stopped. A burst of submachine gun fire came in their place. Skorzeny couldn’t see him, but didn’t care. He was hoping ricochets would do the job for him. They almost did. A couple of bouncing bullets came wickedly close to Jager as he threw himself flat.

“Give up, Skorzeny!” he shouted, wriggling forward with Ludmila beside him. “You’re surrounded!”

“Jager?” For one of the rare times in their acquaintance, he heard Skorzeny astonished. “What are you doing here, you kikeloving motherfucker? I thought I put paid to you for good. They should have hanged you from a noose made of piano wire by now. Well, they will. One day they will.” He fired another long burst. He wasn’t worried about spending ammunition. Bullets whined around Jager, striking sparks as they caromed off bricks and wrecked machines.

Jager scuttled toward him anyhow. If he made it to the next heap of bricks, he could pop up over it and get a decent shot. “Give up!” he yelled again. “We’ll let you go if you do.”

“You’ll be too dead to worry about it, whether I give up or not,” the SS man answered. Then he paused again. “No, maybe not. You should be dead already, as a matter of fact. Why the hell aren’t you?” Now he sounded friendly, interested, as if they were hashing it out over a couple of shots of schnapps.

“Antidote,” Jager told him.

“Isn’t that a kick in the balls?” Skorzeny said. “Well, I’d hoped I’d get out of here in one piece, but-” The but was punctuated by a potato-masher hand grenade that spun hissing through the air and landed five or six meters behind Jager and Ludmila.

He grabbed her and folded both of them into a tight ball an instant before the grenade exploded. The blast was deafening. Hot fragments of casing bit into his back and legs. He grabbed for his Schmeisser, sure Skorzeny would be following hard on the heels of the grenade.

A rifle shot rang out, then another one. Skorzeny’s submachine gun chattered in reply. The bullets weren’t aimed at Jager. He and Ludmila untangled themselves from each other and both rushed to that pile of bricks.

Skorzeny stood swaying like a tree in the breeze. In the gloom, his eyes were enormous, and all pupil: he’d given himself a stiff dose of nerve-gas antidote. Right in the center of the ragged old shirt he wore was a spreading red stain. He brought up his Schmeisser, but for once didn’t seem sure what to do with it, whether to aim at Anielewicz or at Jager and Ludmila.

His foes had no such hesitation. Anielewicz’s rifle and Ludmila’s pistol cracked at the same instant in which Jager squeezed off a burst. More red flowers blossomed on Skorzeny’s body. The breeze in which he swayed became a gale. It blew him over. The submachine gun fell from his hands. His fingers groped toward it, pulling hand and arm after them as they struggled from one rough piece of ground to the next, a centimeter and a half farther on. Jager fired another burst. Skorzeny twitched as the bullets slammed into him, and at last lay still.

Only then did Jager notice the SS man had pried several planks off the big crate that held the explosive-metal bomb. Under them, the aluminum skin of the device lay exposed, like that of a surgical patient revealed by an opening in the drapes. If Skorzeny had already set the detonator in there-

Jager ran toward the bomb. He got there a split second ahead of Anielewicz, who was in turn a split second ahead of Ludmila. Skorzeny had removed one of the panels from the skin. Jager peered into the hole thus exposed. With his pupils so dilated, he had no trouble seeing the hole was empty.

Anielewicz pointed to a cylinder a few centimeters in front of his left foot “That’s the detonator,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the one we pulled or if he brought it with him, the way you said he might. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he didn’t get to use it.”