Distances were hard to judge in that shadowless, almost sourceless light. A farmhouse and barn that had seemed a mile away not two minutes before were now, quite suddenly, all but on top of them. “Shall we beg shelter for the night?” Bagnall said. “I’d sooner sleep in straw than unroll my blanket on ground that’s sure to be damp.”
They approached the farmhouse openly. They’d needed to display Aleksandr German’s safe-conduct only a couple of times; despite their worries, the peasants had on the whole been friendly enough. But they were still a quarter of a mile from the farmhouse, as best Bagnall could judge, when a man inside shouted something at them.
Bagnall frowned. “That’s not German. Did you understand it, Jones?”
The radarman shook his head. “It’s not Russian, either. I’d swear to that, though I don’t quite know what it is.” The shout came again, as unintelligible as before. “I wonder if it’s Estoman,” Jones said in a musing voice. “I hadn’t thought anyone spoke Estonian, the Estonians included.”
“We’re friends!” Bagnall shouted toward the house, first in English, then in German, and last in Russian. Had he known how to say it in Estonian, he would have done that, too. He took a couple of steps forward.
Whoever was in the farmhouse wanted no uninvited guests. A bullet cracked past above Bagnall’s head before he heard the report of the rifle whose flash he’d seen at the window. The range was by no means extreme; maybe the strange light fooled the fellow in there into misjudging it.
Though not an infantryman, Bagnall had done enough fighting on the ground to drop to that ground when someone started shooting at him. So did Ken Embry. They both screamed, “Get down, you fool!” at Jones. He stood gaping till another bullet whined past, this one closer than the first. Then he, too, sprawled on his belly.
That second shot hadn’t come from the farmhouse, but from the barn. Both gunmen kept banging away, too, and a third shooter opened up from another window of the house. “What the devil did we start to walk in on?” Bagnall said, scuttling toward a bush that might conceal him from the hostile locals. “The annual meeting of the Estonian We Hate Everyone Who Isn’t Us League?”
“Shouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Embry answered from behind cover of his own. “If these are Estonians, they must have taken us for Nazis or Bolsheviks or similar lower forms of life. Do we shoot back at them?”
“I’d sooner retreat and go around,” Bagnall said. Just then, though, two men carrying rifles ran out of the barn and toward some little trees not far away to the right. He flicked the safety off his Mauser. “I take it back. If they’re going to hunt us, they have to pay for the privilege.” He brought the German rifle with the awkward bolt up to his shoulder.
Before he could fire, three more men sprinted from the back of the farmhouse toward an outbuilding off to the left. Ken Embry shot at one of them, but the light was as tricky for him as it was for the Estonians. All three of them safely made it to the outbuilding. They started shooting at the RAF men. A couple of bullets kicked up dirt much too close to Bagnall for his liking.
“Bit of a sticky wicket, what?” Jerome Jones drawled. Neither the hackneyed phrase nor the university accent disguised his concern. Bagnall was worried, too.Bugger worried, he told himself-I’m bloody petrified.There were too many Estomans out there, and they too obviously meant business.
The two men in the house and the one still in the barn kept shooting at the Englishmen, making them keep their heads down.
Under cover of their fire and that of the fellow behind the outbuilding, the two Estonians in the trees scooted forward and farther to the right, heading for some tall brush that would give them cover.
Bagnall snapped off a couple of shots at them as they ran, to no visible effect. “They’re going to flank us out,” he said in dismay.
Then another rifle spoke, from behind him and to his right. One of the running men dropped his weapon and crashed to earth as if he’d been sapped. That unexpected rifle cracked again. The second runner went down, too, with a cry of pain that floated over the flat, grassy land.
He tried to crawl to cover, but Bagnall fired twice more at him. One of the bullets must have hit, for the fellow lay quiet and motionless after that.
One of the Estonians behind the outbuilding popped up to shoot. Before he could, the rifleman behind the RAF men squeezed off another round. The Estoman crumpled. He must have dropped his rifle, for it fell where Bagnall could see it. “We have a friend,” he said. “I wonder if he’s Russian or German.” He looked back over his shoulder, but couldn’t see anyone.
The man in the farmhouse who’d fired first-or perhaps someone else using the same window-fired again. At what seemed the same instant, the marksman behind Bagnall also fired. An arm dangled limply from the window till it was dragged back inside.
“Whoever that is back there, he’s a bloody wonder,” Embry said. The Estomans evidently thought the same thing. One of them behind the outbuilding waved a white cloth. “We have a wounded man here,” he called in oddly accented German. “Will you let us take him back to the house?”
“Go ahead,” Bagnall said after a moment’s hesitation. “Will you let us back up and go around you? We didn’t want this fight in the first place.”
“You may do that,” the Estonian answered. “Maybe you are not who we thought you were.”
“Maybe you should have found out about that before you tried blowing our heads off,” Bagnall said. “Go on now, but remember, we have you in our sights-and so does our friend back there.”
Still waving the cloth, the Estonian picked up his fallen comrade’s rifle and slung it on his back. He and his hale companion dragged the wounded man toward the farmhouse. By the limp way he hung in their arms, he was badly hurt.
While they did that, Bagnall and his companions crawled backwards, not fully trusting the truce to which they’d agreed. But the Estonians in the house and barn evidently wanted no more of them. Bagnall realized he was withdrawing in the direction of the rifleman who’d bailed them out of that tight spot. Softly, he called,“Danke sehr,” and then, to cover all bases,“Spasebo.”
“Nye za chto-you’re welcome,” came the answer: he’d guessed right the second time. That wasn’t what made his jaw drop foolishly, though. He’d expected whatever answer he got to be baritone, not creamy contralto.
Jerome Jones yelped like a puppy with its tail caught in a door. “Tatiana!” he exclaimed, and went on in Russian, “What are you doing here?”
“Never mind that now,” the sniper answered. “First we go around that house full of anti-Soviet reactionaries, since you Englishmen were foolish enough to give them quarter.”
“How do you know they aren’t anti-fascist patriots?” Embry asked in a mixture of German and Russian.
Tatiana Pirogova let out an annoyed snort. “They are Estonians, so they must be anti-Soviet.” She spoke as if stating a law of nature. Bagnall didn’t feel inclined to quarrel with her, not after what she’d just done for them.
She didn’t say anything else as she led the RAF men on a long loop around the farmhouse. It went slowly; none of them dared stand while they might still be in rifle range. The house and barn, though, remained as silent as if uninhabited. Bagnall wished they had been.
At last, cat-wary, Tatiana got to her feet. The Englishmen followed her lead, grunting with relief. “How did you come upon us at just the right moment?” Bagnall asked her, taking her rising as giving him leave to speak.