Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

Aleksandr German did not bother gesticulating with the pistol on the table. He simply spoke in a dry, rather pedantic voice that went well with his eyeglasses. His words sounded like German, but Bagnall had even more trouble with them than he had in following Kurt Chill. He guessed the partisan was actually speaking Yiddish. To stay up with that, they should have kept David Goldfarb as crew radarman.

Captain Borcke made sense of it. He translated: “German says the Wehrmacht is stronger around Pskov than Soviet forces, yes. He asks if it is also stronger than Soviet and Lizard forces combined.”

Chill spoke a single word: “Bluff.”

“ Nyet,” Vasiliev said again. He put down his weapon and beamed at the other partisan leader. He’d found a threat the Germans could not afford to ignore.

Bagnall did not think it was a bluff, either. Germany had not endeared itself to the people of any of the eastern lands it occupied before the Lizards came. The Jews of Poland-led by, among others, a cousin of Goldfarb’s-had risen against the Nazis and for the Lizards. The Russians might do the same if this Chill pushed them hard enough.

He might, too. Scowling at the two partisan brigadiers, he said, “You may do this. The Lizards may win a victory through it. But this I vow: neither of you will live long enough to collaborate with them. We will have that radar.”

“ Nyet .” This time Aleksandr German said it. He switched back to Yiddish, too fast and harsh for Bagnall to follow. Captain Borcke again did the honors: “He says this set was sent to the workers and people of the Soviet Union to aid them in their struggle against imperialist aggression, and that surrendering it would be treason to the Soviet state.”

Communist rhetoric aside, Bagnall thought the partisan was dead right. But if Lieutenant General Chill didn’t, the flight engineer’s opinion counted for little.

And Chill was going to be hard-nosed about it. Bagnall could see that. So could everyone else in the tower chamber. Captain Borcke edged away from the RAF air crew to one side, Sergei Morozkin to the other. Both men slid a hand under their coats, presumably to grab for pistols. Bagnall got ready to throw himself flat.

Then, instead, he hissed at Jerome Jones: “You have the manuals and such for the radar, am I right?”

“Of course,” Jones whispered back. “Couldn’t very well come without them, not when the Russians are going to start making them for themselves. Or they will if anyone comes out of this room alive.”

“Which doesn’t look like the best wager in the world. How many sets have you got?”

“Of the manuals and drawings, you mean? Just the one,” Jones said.

“Bugger.” That put a crimp in Bagnall’s scheme, but only for a moment. He spoke up in a loud voice: “Gentlemen, please!” If nothing else, he succeeded in distracting the Germans and partisans from the bead they were drawing on each other. Everyone stared at him instead. He said, “I think I can find a way out of this dispute.”

Grim faces defied him to do it. Trouble was, he realized suddenly, the Germans and Russians really wanted to have a go at each other. In English, Kurt Chill said, “Enlighten us, then.”

“I’ll do my best,” Bagnall answered. “There’s only the one radar, and no help for that. If you hijack it, word will get back to Moscow-and to London. Cooperation between Germany and her former foes will be hampered, and the Lizards will likely gain more from that than the Luftwaffe could from the radar. Is this so, or not?”

“It may be,” Chill said. “I do not think, though, there is much cooperation now, when you give the Russians and not us this set.” Captain Borcke nodded emphatically at that.

There was much truth in what the German general said. Bagnall was anything but happy about sharing secrets with the Nazis, and his attitude reflected that of British leaders from Churchill on down. But setting the Wehrmacht and the Red Army back at each other’s throats wasn’t what anyone had had in mind, either.

The flight engineer said, “How is this, then? The radar itself and the manuals go on toward Moscow as planned. But before they do”-he sighed-“you make copies of the manuals and send them to Berlin.”

“Copies?” Chill said. “By photograph?”

“If you have that kind of equipment here, yes.” Bagnall had been thinking of doing the job by hand; Pskov struck him as a burnt-out backwater town. But who could say what sort of gear the division intelligence unit of the 122nd Infantry-or whatever other units were in the area-had available?

“I’m not sure the higher-ups back home would approve, but they didn’t anticipate this situation,” Ken Embry murmured. “As for me, I’d say you’ve managed to saw the baby in half. King Solomon would be proud.”

“I hope so,” Bagnall said.

Sergei Morozkin was still translating his suggestion for the partisan leaders. When he finished, Vasiliev turned to Aleksandr German and said with heavy humor, “ Nu Sasha?” It had to be more Yiddish-Bagnall had heard that word from David Goldfarb.

Aleksandr German peered through his spectacles at Chill the German. Having Goldfarb in the aircrew for a while had made Bagnall more aware of what the Nazis had done to Eastern European Jews than he otherwise would have been. He wondered what went on behind German’s poker face, how much hatred seethed there. The partisan did not let on. After a while, he sighed and spoke one word: “ Da .”

“We shall do this, then.” If Chill was enthusiastic about Bagnall’s plan, he hid it very well. But it gave him most of what he wanted, and kept alive the fragile truce around Pskov.

As if to underline how important that was, Lizard jets streaked overhead. When bombs began to fall, Bagnall felt something near panic: a hit anywhere close by would bring all the stones of the Krom down on his head.

Through the fading wail of the Lizards’ engines and the ground-shaking crash of the bombs came the rattle of what sounded like every rifle and submachine gun in the world going off at once. Pskov’s defenders, Nazis and Communists alike, did their best to knock down the Lizards’ planes.

As usual, their best was not good enough. Bagnall listened hopefully for the rending crash that would have meant a fighter-bomber destroyed, but it never came. He also listened for the roar that would warn of a second wave of attackers. That didn’t come, either.

“Anyone would think that flying more than a thousand miles would take us out of the bloody blitz,” Alf Whyte complained.

“They called it a world war even before the Lizards came,” Embry said.

Nikolai Vasiliev shouted something at Morozkin. Instead of translating it, he hurried away to return a few minutes later with a tray full of bottles and glasses. “We drink to this-how you say? — agreement,” he said.

He was pouring man-sized slugs of vodka for everyone when a partisan burst in, shouting in Russian. “Uh-oh,” Jerome Jones said. “I didn’t catch all of that, but I didn’t care for what I understood.”

Morozkin turned to the RAF air crew. “I have-bad news. Those-how you say? — Lizards, they bomb your plane. Is wreck and ruin-is that what you say?”

“That’s what we say,” Embry answered dully.

“ Nichevo, tovarishchi,” Morozkin said.

He didn’t translate that, maybe because it was so completely Russian that doing so never occurred to him. “What did he say?” Bagnall demanded of Jerome Jones.

“ ‘It can’t be helped, comrades’-something like that,” the radarman answered. “ ‘There’s nothing to be done about it,’ might be a better rendering.”