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.”
One of the partisans said, “How do we know the real one will go where it’s supposed to?”
All the worn, dirty men, Russians and Germans alike, nodded at that. They still had no great trust in one another; they’d fought too hard for that. Skorzeny said, “We have one from each side holding the prize. The panje wagon that’s waiting for them has one from each side, too. If they don’t try to murder each other, we’ll be all right, ja?”
The SS man laughed to show he’d made a joke. Jager looked over to Max. The Jew was not laughing. He wore the expression Jager had often seen on junior officers who faced a tough tactical problem: he was weighing his options. That meant Jager had to weigh his, too.
Skorzeny said, “We’ll go out one pair at a time. The team with the real chest will go third.”
“Who told you you were God?” a partisan asked.
The SS man’s scarred cheek crinkled as he gave an impudent grin. “Who told you I wasn’t?” He waited a moment to see if he got any more argument. When he didn’t, he swatted a man from the pair closest to him on the shoulder and shouted “Go! Go! Go!” as if they were paratroopers diving out of a Ju-52 transport plane.
The second pair followed a moment later. Then Skorzeny yelled “Go! Go! Go!” again and Jager and Max burst out of the woods and started off toward the promised panje wagon. It waited several kilometers north and west, outside the Lizards’ tightest security zone. Jager wanted to sprint the whole way. Slogging through mud carrying a heavy chest, that wasn’t practical.
“I’m fucking sick of rain,” Max said, though he knew as well as Jager that the snow which would follow was even harder to endure.
Jager said, “Right now I don’t mind rain at all. The Lizards will have a harder time chasing us through it than they would on dry ground. The low clouds will make us harder to spot through the air, too. If you want to get right down to it, I wouldn’t mind fog, either.”
“I would,” Max said. “We’d get lost.”
“I have a compass.”
“Very efficient,” Max said dryly. Jager took it for a compliment until he remembered it was the word the Jew had used to describe the assembly-line murder at-what was the name of the place? — at Babi Yar, that was it.
Anger surged in the panzer major. The trouble was, he had trouble deciding whether to turn it on his own people for dishonoring the uniforms they wore or the Jew for telling him about it and making him notice it. He glanced over at Max. As usual, Max was watching him. He had no trouble finding a focus for his fury.
Jager twisted his head, looked behind him. The driving rain had already obscured the woods. He could see one of the decoy pairs, but only one. He wouldn’t have wanted to track anyone in weather like this, and wished just as much trouble on the Lizards. They wouldn’t pursue in panzers, anyhow; from what he’d seen, their armor had at least as much trouble coping with Russian mud as the Wehrmacht did.
He must have been thinking aloud. Max grinned an unsympathetic grin and said, “You poor bogged-down bastards.”
“Fuck you, too, Max.” In the wrong tone of voice, that would have started the fight Skorzeny had not-quite-joked about. As it was, the Jewish partisan’s expression changed shape as if he, like Jager, had to change some of his thinking.
Then both men’s faces congealed to fear. The Lizards had more helicopters in the air, and this time no flak cannon would stop them. Rifle shots rang out from back in the woods, but using a rifle against one of these machines was as magnificently futile as the Polish lancers’ charges against German panzers back when the war-the human war-was new.
But these rifle bullets did have some effect. The whistling roar of the copter rotors grew no louder. The deadly machines hovered over the trees. Their guns snarled. When they paused, more rifle fire announced that they hadn’t finished off all the raiders. The yarnmering resumed.
The sound from the helicopters changed. Jager looked back, but could see nothing through the curtains of rain. He tried to be optimistic anyhow: “Maybe they’re settling down so they can comb through the woods-if they are, they’ll be looking in the wrong place.”
Max was less sanguine: “Don’t count on them to be so fucking stupid.”
“They aren’t what you’d call good soldiers, not in the tactical sense,” Jager answered seriously. “They’re brave enough, and of course they have all that wonderful equipment, but ask them to do anything they haven’t planned out in advance and they start floundering around.” They’re even worse than Russians that way, he thought, but he kept quiet about that.
The strafing from the helicopters hadn’t slaughtered all the raiders. Rifles barked again; a Soviet submachine gun added its note to the din. Then, harsher and flatter, Lizard automatic small arms answered.
“They have landed troops!” Jager exclaimed. “The longer they waste time back there, the better the chance the mission has of succeeding.”
“And the likelier they’ll kill off my friends,” Max said. “Yours too, I suppose. Does a fucking Nazi have friends? After a tough day shooting Jews in the back of the neck, do you go out and drink some beer with your Kameraden?”
“I’m a soldier, not a butcher,” Jager said. He wondered whether Georg Schultz had got one of the dummy chests. If so, he was tramping through the mud, too. If not… He also wondered about Otto Skorzeny. The SS captain seemed to have a gift for creating impossible situations and then escaping from them. He’d need all that gift now. But thinking of the SS made Jager think of Babi Yar. That would have been their doing; Wehrmacht men couldn’t have stomached it. He added, “You Russians have butchers, too.”
“So?” Max said. “Does that make you right?” Jager found no good answer. The Jewish partisan went on, “I wish they’d sent me to the gulag in Siberia years before you fucking Germans ever got to Kiev. Then I wouldn’t have had to see what I saw.”
Further argument cut off abruptly when Jager fell headlong into the muck. Max helped him haul himself to his feet. They pushed on. Jager felt as if he were a hundred years old. A kilometer through this clinging goo was worse than a day’s march on hard, dry ground. He wistfully wondered whether the Soviet Union contained so much as a square centimeter of hard, dry ground at the moment.
He also wondered for what the soft, wet ground over which he was fleeing had been used. In Germany, land had a clearly defined purpose: meadow, crops, forest, park, town. This stretch met no such criteria. It was just land-raw terrain. Of that the Soviet Union had unending inefficient abundance.