“Think we’ll have time to get all this stuff ready?”
“I don’t know, Sofie,” he said simply. “I hope so. Before the real attack, anyway. We’ll probably get a probe quite soon. With luck . . . ”
Senior Decurion McWhirter cleared his throat. “Say, sir, what was it you used on the old raghead? Thought he was a tough old bastard but he caved in real easy.”
“I used the lowest, vilest means I could,” Eric said softly. The NCO’s eyes widened in surprise. “I gave him hope.”
Chapter Ten
VILLAGE ONE, OSSETIAN MILITARY HIGHWAY
APRIL 14, 1942: 0700 HOURS
The partisans were being held in what looked to be a stock pen—new barbed wire on ancient piled stone. A walking-wounded Draka trooper stood guard; the German formerly assigned to that duty was lying on his back across the wall, his belly opened by a drawing slash from a bush knife and the cavity buzzing black with flies. The prisoners ignored him; even with Eric’s arrival, few looked up from their frenzied attack on the loaves of stale black bread that had been thrown to them. One vomited noisily, seized another chunk and began to eat again. There were thirty of them, and they stank worse than the rest of the village. They were standing in their own excrement, and half a dozen had wounds gone pus-rotten with gas gangrene.
They were Slavs, mostly: stockier than the Circassian natives, flatter faced and more often blond, in peasant blouses or the remnants of Soviet uniform. Young men, if you could look past the months of chronic malnutrition, sickness, and overstrain. A few had been tortured and all bore the marks of rifle butts, whips, rubber truncheons. Eric shook his head in disgust; in the Domination, this display would have been considered disgraceful even for convicts on their way to the prison mines of the Ituri jungles or the saltworks of Kashgar, the last sinkholes for incorrigibles. Anybody would torture for information in war, of course, and the Security Directorate was not notable for mercy toward rebels. Still, this was petty meanness. If they were dangerous, kill them; if not, put them to some use.
One thick-set prisoner straightened, brushed his hands down a torn and filth-spattered uniform tunic and came to the edge of the wire. His eyes flickered to the guard, noted how she came erect at the officer’s approach.
“Uvaha hchloptsi, to yeehchniy kommandyr,” he cast back over his shoulder, and waited, looking the Draka steadily in the eye.
Eric considered him appraisingly and nodded. This one, he thought, is a brave man. Pity we’d probably have to kill him if the Fritz don’t do us the favor. Aloud: “Sprechen zie Deutsch? Parlez-vous Frangais? Circassian?”
A shake of the head; the Draka commander paused in thought, almost started in surprise to hear Sofie’s voice.
“I speak Russian, Centurion,” Sofie said. He raised a brow; everybody had to do one foreign language, but that was not a common choice. “Not in school. My pa, he with Henderson when the Fourth took Krasnovodsk, back in 1918. He brought back a Russki wench, Katie. She was my nursemaid an’ I learned it from her. Still talk it pretty good. He just said: ‘Watch out, boys, that’s the commander.’ ”
Sofie turned to the captives and spoke, slowly at first and then with gathering assurance. The Russian frowned and waved his companions to silence, then replied. The ghost of a smile touched his face, despite the massive bruise that puffed the left side of his mouth.
Grinning, she switched back into English. “Ya, he understands. Says I’ve got an old-fashioned Moscow accent, like a boyar, a noble. Hey, Katie always said she was a countess; maybe it was true.” A shake of the head. “S’true she was never much good at housework, wouldn’t do it. Screwing the Master was all right, looking after children was fine, but show her a mop and she’d sulk for days. Ma gave up on trying . . . ”
Actually, the whole Nixon household had been fond of Ekaterina Ilyichmanova; with her moods and flightiness and disdain for detail, she had fitted in perfectly with the general atmosphere of cheerfully sloppy anarchy. Sophie’s father had always considered her his best war souvenir and had treated her with casual indulgence; she was something of an extravagance for a man of his modest social standing and her slender, great-eyed good looks were not at all his usual taste. Sophie and her brothers had gone to some trouble to find their nursemaid the Christian priest she wanted during her last illness and had been surprised at how empty a space she left in the rambling house below Lion’s Head.
Eric nodded thoughtfully. “Good thinking, Sofie. All right . . . ask him if there are more like him in the woods and the villages down in the plains.”
The Russian listened carefully to the translation, spoke a short sentence and spat at the Draka officer’s feet. Eric waved back the guard’s bayonet impatiently.
“Ahhh—” Sofie hesitated. “Ah, Centurion, he sort of asked why the fuck he should tell a neimetsky-son-of-a-bitch anything and invited you to take up where the fornicating Fritzes left off.” She frowned. “I think he’s got a pretty thick country-boy accent. Don’t know what a neimetsky is, but it’s not nohow complimentary. And he says it’s our fault they’re in this mess anyway.”
Eric smiled thinly, hands linked behind his back, rising and falling thoughtfully on the balls of his feet. There was an element of truth in that; the Stavka, the Soviet high command, had never been able to throw all its reserves against the Germans with the standing menace of the Domination on thousands of kilometers of southern front. And the Draka had taken two million square miles of central Asia in the Great War, while Russia was helpless with revolution and civil strife, all the way north to the foothills of the Urals, and east to Baikal.
Fairly perceptive, the Draka officer thought. Especially for a peasant like this. He must have been a Party member. The flat Slav face stared back at him, watchful but not at all afraid.
Can’t be a fool, Eric’s musing continued. Not and have survived the winter and spring. He’s not nervous with an automatic weapon pointed at him, either. Or at the bayonet, for that matter; the damn things were usually still useful for crowd control, if nothing else.
“Stupid,” he said meditatively.
“Sir?” Sofie asked.
“Oh, not him, the Fritz. Talking about a thousand-year Reich, then acting as if it all had to be done tomorrow . . . ” His tone grew crisper. “Ask his name. Ask him how he’d like to be released with all his men—with all the food they can carry, a brand-new Fritz rifle and a hundred rounds each.”
Shocked, Sophie raised her eyebrows shrugged and spoke. This time the Russian laughed. “He says he’s called Ivan Desonovich Yuhnkov, and he’d prefer MP40 submachine guns and grenades. While we’re at it, could we please give him some tanks and a ticket to New York, and Hitler’s head, and what sort of fool do you think he is? Sorry, sir.”
Eric reached out a hand for the microphone, spoke. Minutes stretched; he waited without movement, then extended a hand to Sofie. “Cigarette?” he asked.
Carefully expressionless, she lit a second from her own and placed it between his lips. Well, the iron man is nervous, too, she thought. Sometimes she got the feeling that Eric could take calculated risks on pure intellect, simply from analysis of what was necessary. It was reassuring that he could need the soothing effect of the nicotine.
The other partisans had finished the bread. They crowded in behind their leader, silent, the hale supporting the wounded. A mountain wind soughed, louder than their breath and the slight sucking noises of their rag-wrapped feet in the mud and filth of the pen. The eyes in the stubbled faces . . . Covertly, Eric studied them. Some were those of brutalized animals, the ones who had stopped thinking because thought brought nothing that was good; now they live from one day . . . no, from one meal to the next, or one night’s sleep. He recognized that look; it was common enough in the world his caste had built. And he recognized the stare of the others—the men who had fought on long after the death of hope because there was really nothing else to do. That he saw in the mirror, every morning.