Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Too late, the helicopter swung toward its tormentor. The 2-centimeter Flak 38 kept pounding away. Like a sinking ship, the helicopter heeled over onto one side and crashed.

The raiders’ cheers filled the woods. Max pumped his fist in the air and screamed, “Take that, you-” Jager couldn’t follow the rest of the Yiddish he called it, but it sounded explosive. The panzer major yelled himself, then blinked. Fighting alongside a Jew was one thing; tactics dictated that. Finding you agreed with him, finding you might even like him as a man, was something else again. If he lived long enough, Jager would have to think about that.

Otto Skorzeny came dodging through the trees. Even filthy, even in dappled SS camouflage gear, he managed to look dapper. He shouted, “Move, you stupid fools! If we don’t get away now, we never will. You think the Lizards are going to sit there with their thumbs up their arses forever? It’s your funeral, if you do.”

As usual, Skorzeny galvanized everyone around him. The Red partisans undoubtedly hated him still, but who could argue with a man who’d just singlehandedly wrecked a Lizard panzer? The raiders hurried deeper into the woods.

None too soon-again Jager heard the thuttering roar of helicopters in the air. He glanced back and saw a pair of them now. The Germans manning the antiaircraft cannon opened up at long range this time, hoping to knock down one in a hurry so they could fight the other on more even terms-and also hoping to draw both machines’ fire onto themselves and away from their fleeing comrades.

The helicopters separated, swung around to engage the antiaircraft cannon from opposite sides. Jager wished the gun were a big 88; it could have’ swatted the copters like flies. But an 88 was anything but a man-portable weapon-it had a barrel almost seven meters long and weighed more than eight tonnes. The stubby mountain antiaircraft gun would have to do.

One of the helicopters blew up in midair, showering flaming debris over the woods. The other bored in for a firing run. Jager watched tracers from the cannon on the ground swivel through a wild arc, then stab up at the second helicopter while tracers from its machine guns stabbed down.

The 2-centimeter Flak 38 suddenly fell silent. But the helicopter did not go on to pursue the partisans. A rending crash moments later told him why. The gunners had done their duty as well as they were able-better than anyone dared hope when the mission was planned.

The partisan carrying the lead-lined box with Jager was at the end of his tether, stumbling and staggering and gasping like a man breathing his last Jager scowled at him. “Get away from there and put somebody else on that handle before you ruin the mission and get us both killed.” Only after he’d spoken did he notice the order in which he’d put those two elements. He grunted. In case he hadn’t noticed, that would have told him he was a thoroughly trained soldier.

The raider nodded his thanks and reeled away. Georg Schultz hurried up. “Here, I’ll take some of that, sir,” he said, nodding to the burden Jager now held alone.

“No, let me.” It was Max, the foul-mouthed Jewish partisan: He wasn’t as big, probably wasn’t as strong as Schultz, but he’d shown himself to be wiry and tough. All other things being equal, Jager would have preferred his tank gunner beside him, but all other things were not equal. The mission might depend on cooperation between surviving Germans and Russians. Having two Germans carrying the precious whatever-it-was inside that chest might make the Reds think harder about selling them out.

All that ran through Jager’s head in a couple of seconds. He couldn’t afford to think very long; hanging onto the chest solo was hard work. He said, “Let the Jew do it, Georg.” Schultz looked unhappy but fell back a couple of paces. Max took one of the handles from Jager. Together, they started moving again.

Even as he trotted beside Jager, Max glared at him. “How would you like it if I said, ‘Let the fucking Nazi do it,’ eh, Mister fucking Nazi?”

“That’s Major fucking Nazi to you, Mister Jew,” Jager retorted. “And the next time you want to go swearing at me, kindly remember those flak men back there who stayed at their gun and got shot up to help you make your getaway.”

“They did their jobs,” Max snapped. But after he spat into a clump of brown leaves, he added, “Yeah, all right, I’ll remember them in the kaddish.”

“I don’t know that word,” Jager said.

“Prayer for the dead,” Max said shortly. He glanced toward Jager again. Now his gaze was measuring instead of hostile, but somehow no easier to bear. “You don’t know fucking much, do you? You don’t know Babi Yar for instance, eh?”

“No,” Jager admitted. “What’s that?”

“Place a little outside of Kiev, not far from here, as a matter of fact. You find a big hole in the ground, then line Jews up at the edge of it. Men, women, children-doesn’t matter. You line ’em up, you shoot ’em in the back of the neck. They fall right into their own graves. You Germans are fucking efficient, you know? Then you line up another row and shoot them, too. You keep doing it till your big hole is full. Then you find yourself another fucking hole.”

“Propaganda-” Jager said.

Without a word, Max used his free hand to pull down the collar of his peasant’s blouse and bare his neck. Jager knew a gunshot scar when he saw one. The Jew said, “I must have jerked just as the gun went off behind me. I fell down. They had bastards down in the hole with more guns, making sure everybody really was dead. They must have missed me. I hope they don’t get a fucking reprimand, you know? More people fell on me, but not too many-it was getting late. When it was dark, I managed to crawl out and get away. I’ve been killing fucking Germans ever since.”

Jager didn’t answer. He hadn’t gone out of his way to notice what happened to Jews in Russian territory taken by the Germans. Nobody in the Wehrmacht went out of his way to notice that. It wasn’t safe for your career; it might not be safe for you personally. He’d heard things. Everybody heard things. He hadn’t worried much about it. After all, the Fuhrer had declared Jews the enemies of the Reich.

But there were ways soldiers treated enemies. Lining them up at the edge of a pit and shooting them from behind wasn’t supposed to be one of those ways. Jager tried to imagine himself doing that. It wasn’t easy. But if the Reich was at war and his superior gave him the order… He shook his head. He just didn’t know.

From across the chest, less than a meter away, his Jewish yokemate watched him flounder. Watching Max watch him only made Jager flounder harder. If Jews could flip-flop from enemies of the Reich to comrades-in-arms, that just made massacring them all the harder to stomach.

Max’s voice was sly. “You maybe have a fucking conscience?”

“Of course I have a conscience,” Jager said indignantly. Then he shut up again. If he had a conscience, as he’d automatically claimed, how was he supposed to ignore what Germany might well have been doing? (Even in his own mind, he didn’t want to phrase it any more definitely than that.).

To his relief, the woods started thinning out ahead. That meant the most dangerous part of the mission-crossing open country with what they’d stolen from the Lizards-lay ahead. Beside the abyss whose edge he’d been treading with Max, physical danger suddenly seemed a welcome diversion. As long as be was putting his own life on the line, he’d be too busy to look down into the abyss and see the people piled there with neat holes in the backs of their necks.

The survivors of the raiding party gathered near the edge of the trees. Skorzeny took charge of them. From under the thick layer of dead leaves, he pulled out several chests which looked the same as the one Jager and Max carried but were not lead-lined. “Two men to each one,” he ordered, pausing to let the Russian partisans who understood German translate for those who didn’t. “We scatter now, two by two, to make it as hard as we can for the Lizards to figure out who has the real one.”