“You’re still here,” Jager noted.
“You noticed that, did you?” Skorzeny made as if to kiss him on the cheek. “You’re such a clever boy. And both the Poles are dead, too. It took a while-we know to the zloty how big their payoff was.” His smile showed teeth; maybe he was remembering how the Poles perished. But then he looked grim. “Lieutenant-Colonel Brockelmann is dead, too. Unlucky son of a whore happened to be about my size. One of the Poles blew off the top of his head from behind at about a thousand meters. Damn fine shooting, I must say. I complimented the fellow on it as I handed him his trigger finger.”
“I’m sure he appreciated that,” Jager said dryly. Associating with Skorzeny had rubbed his nose in all the uglier parts of warfare, the parts he hadn’t had to think about as a panzer commander. Mass murder, torture… he hadn’t signed up for those. But they were part of the package whether he’d signed up for them or not. Was destroying a city where the people were doing theReich more good than harm? Was their being Jews reason enough? Was their having piqued Skorzeny for not letting him destroy them on his first try reason enough? He’d have to think about that-and he couldn’t waste too much time doing it, either. Meanwhile, he asked, “So what am I supposed to do about all this? What’s the favor you have in mind? I’ve never been into Lodz, you know.”
“Oh, yes, I know that.” Skorzeny stretched like a tiger deciding he was too full to go hunting right now. “If you had been in Lodz, you’d be talking with theSicherheitsdienst or theGestapo now, not me.”
“I’ve talked with them before.” Jager shrugged, trying not to show the stab of alarm he felt.
“I know that, too,” Skorzeny answered. “But they would be asking more-pointed questions this time, and using more pointed tools. Never mind all that. I don’t want you to go into Lodz.” The tiger became more alert. “I’m not sure I’d trust you to go into Lodz. I want you to lay on a diversionary attack, make the Lizards look someplace else, while I trundle on down the road with my band of elves and make like St. Nicholas.”
“Can’t do it tomorrow. If that’s what you have in mind,” Jager answered promptly-and truthfully. “Every time we fight, it hurts us worse than the Lizards, a lot worse. You know that. We’re sort of putting things back together here right now, bringing up new panzers, new men, getting somewhere close-well, closer-to establishment strength. Give me a week or ten days.”
He expected Skorzeny to blow up, to demand action yesterday if not sooner. But the SS man surprised him-Skorzeny spent a lot of time surprising him-by nodding. “That’s fine. I still have some arrangements of my own to work out. Even for elves, hauling in a bloody big crate takes a bit of planning. I’ll let you know when I need you.” He thumped Jager on the back. “Now you can go back to thinking about your Russian with her clothes off.” He walked away, laughing till he wheezed.
“What the devil was all that in aid of, sir?” Gunther Grillparzer asked.
“The devil indeed.” Jager glanced toward the panzer gunner, whose eyes followed Skorzeny as if he were some cinema hero. “He’s found some new reasons for getting a bunch of us killed, Gunther.”
“Wunderbar!”Grillparzer said with altogether unfeigned enthusiasm, leaving Jager to contemplate the vagaries of youth. He came up with a twisted version of the Book of Ecclesiastes: vagary of vagaries, all is vagary. It seemed as good a description of real life as the more accurate reading.
“Ah, good to see you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Iosef Stalin said as Molotov entered his Kremlin office.
“And you, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov answered. Stalin had a purr in his voice that Molotov hadn’t heard in a long time: not since just after the previous Soviet atomic bomb, as best he could remember. The last time he’d heard it before that was when the Red Army threw the Nazis back from the gates of Moscow at the end of 1941. It meant Stalin thought things were looking up for the time being.
“I presume you have again conveyed to the Lizards our non-negotiable demand that they cease their aggression and immediately withdraw from the territory of the peace-loving Soviet Union,” Stalin said. “Perhaps they will pay more attention to this demand after Saratov.”
“Perhaps they will, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said. Neither of them mentioned Magnitogorsk, which had ceased to exist shortly after Saratov was incinerated. Measured against the blow dealt the Lizards, the loss of any one city, even an important industrial center like Magnitogorsk, was a small matter. Molotov went on, “At least they have not rejected the demand out of hand, as they did when we made it on previous occasions.”
“If once we get them to the conference table, we shall defeat them there,” Stalin said. “Not only does the dialectic predict this, so does their behavior at all previous conferences. They are too strong for us to drive them from the world altogether, I fear, but once we get them talking, we shall free the Soviet Union and its workers and peasants of them.”
“I am given to understand they have also received withdrawal demands from the governments of the United States and Germany,” Molotov said. “As those are also powers possessing atomic weapons, the Lizards will have to hear them as seriously as they hear us.”
“Yes.” Stalin filled a pipe withmakhorka and puffed out a cloud of acrid smoke. “It is the end for Britain, you know. Were Churchill not a capitalist exploiter, I might have sympathy for him. The British did a very great thing, expelling the Lizards from their island, but what has it got them in the end? Nothing.”
“They could yet produce their own atomic weapons,” Molotov said. “Underestimating them does not pay.”
“As Hitler found, to his dismay,” Stalin agreed. For his part, Stalin had underestimated Hitler, but Molotov did not point that out. Stalin sucked meditatively on the pipe for a little while before going on, “Even if they make these bombs for themselves, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, what good does it do them? They have already saved their island without the bombs. They cannot save their empire with them, for they have no way of delivering them to Africa or India. Those will stay in the Lizards’ hands from this time forward.”
“A cogent point,” Molotov admitted. You endangered yourself if you underestimated Stalin’s capacity. He was always brutal, he could be naive, foolish, shortsighted. But when he was right, as he often was, he was so breathtakingly right as to make up for the rest.
He said, “If the German fascists persuade the Lizards to withdraw from territory that had been under their occupation before the aliens invaded, it will be interesting to see how many of those lands eagerly return to Nazi control.”
“Much of the land the fascists occupied was ours,” Molotov said. “The Lizards did us a favor by clearing them from so much of it.” Nazi-held pockets persisted in the north and near the Romanian frontier, and Nazi bands one step up from guerrillas still ranged over much of what the Germans had controlled, but those were manageable problems, unlike the deadly threats the fascists had posed and the Lizards now did.
Stalin sensed that, too, saying, “Personally, I would not be brokenhearted to see the Lizards remain in Poland. With peace, better them on our western border than the fascists: having made a treaty, they are more likely to adhere to it.”
He had underestimated Hitler once; he would not do it twice. Molotov nodded vigorously. Here he agreed with his superior. “With the Nazis’ rockets, with their gas that paralyzes breathing, with their explosive-metal bombs, and with their fascist ideology, they would make most unpleasant neighbors.”