“Not a phrase I’ve learned, I’m afraid, but I don’t believe the partisans need our advice in that regard,” Bagnall answered. Russians and Germans alike were in full retreat, the tanks hastening on their way-and hastening too many of them into the world to come-with more cannon rounds. Shell splinters and real splinters blown off trees hissed through the air with deadly effect.
“Someone’s reconnaissance slipped up badly,” Embry said. “This was supposed to be, an infantry outpost. No one said a word about going up against armor.”
Bagnall only grunted. What Embry had said was self-evidently true. Men were dying because of it. His main hope at present was not being one who did. Through the crash of the cannon, he heard another noise, one he didn’t recognize: a quick, deep thutter that seemed to come out of the air.
“What’s that?” he said. Beside him, Embry shrugged. The Russians were running faster than ever, crying “Vertolyet!” and “Avtozhir.” Neither word, unfortunately, meant anything to Bagnall.
Fire came out of the sky from just above treetop height: streaks of flame as if from a Katyusha launcher taken aloft and mounted on a flying machine instead of a truck. The woods exploded into flame as the rocket warheads detonated. Bagnall shrieked like a lost soul, but couldn’t even hear himself.
Whatever had fired the rockets, it wasn’t an ordinary airplane. It hung in the sky, hovering like a mosquito the size of a young whale, as it loosed another salvo of rockets on the humans who had presumed to attack a Lizard position. More deadly shrapnel flew. Buffeted, half stunned by the blast, Bagnall lay flat on the ground, as he might have during a great earthquake, and prayed the pounding would end.
But another helicopter came whickering up from the south and poured two more salvos of rockets into the raiders’ ranks. Both machines hovered overhead and raked the forest with machine-gun fire. The tanks came crashing closer, too, smashing down everything that stood in their way but the bigger trees.
Somebody booted Bagnall in the backside, hard. “Get up and run, you bloody twit!” The words were in English. Bagnall turned his head. It was Ken Embry, his foot drawn back for another kick.
“I’m all right,” Bagnall said, and proved it by getting up. As soon as he was on his pins again, adrenaline made him run like a deer. He fled north-or, at any rate, away from the tanks and the helicopters’ killing ground. Embry matched him stride for desperate stride. Somewhere in their mad dash, Bagnall gasped out, “Where’s Alf?”
“He bought his plot back there, I’m afraid,” Embry answered.
That hit Bagnall like-like a machine-gun round from one of the deathships up there, he thought. Watching Russians and Germans he didn’t know getting shot or blown to bits was one thing. Losing someone from his own crew was ten times worse-as if a flak burst had torn through the side of his Lancaster and slaughtered a bombardier. And since Whyte was-had been-one of the three other men in Pskov with whom he could speak freely, he felt the loss all the more.
Bullets still slashed the woods, most of them, though, behind the fleeing Englishmen now. The Lizards’ tanks did not press the pursuit as aggressively as they might have. “Maybe they’re afraid of taking a Molotov cocktail from someone up a tree whom they don’t spy till too late,” Embry suggested when Bagnall said that out loud.
“Maybe they are,” the flight engineer said. “I’m damned sure I’m afraid of them.”
The gunfire and rockets and cannon rounds had left his ears as dazed as any other part of him. Dimly, as If from far away, he heard screams of terror and the even more appalling shrieks of the wounded. One of the helicopters flew away, then, after a last hosing of the woods with bullets, the other one. Bagnall looked down at his wrist. The glowing hands of his watch said only twenty minutes had gone by since the first shots were fired. Those twenty minutes of hell had stretched for an eternity. Though not ordinarily a religious man, Bagnall wondered how long a real eternity of hell would seem to last.
Then his thoughts snapped back to the present, for he almost stumbled over a wounded Russian lying in a pool of blood that looked black against the snow at night. “Bozhemoi,” the Russian moaned. “Bozhemoi.”
“My God,” Bagnall gasped, unconsciously translating. “Ken, come over here and help me. It’s a woman.”
“I hear.” The pilot and Bagnall stooped beside the wounded partisan. She pressed a hand against her side, trying to stanch the flow of blood.
As gently as he could, Bagnall undid her quilted coat and tunic so he could see the wound. He had to force her hand away before he could bandage it with gauze from his aid kit. She groaned and thrashed and weakly tried to fight him off.
“Nemtsi,” she wailed.
“She thinks we’re Jerries,” Embry said. “Here, give her this, too.” He pressed a morphia syrette into Bagnall’s hand.
Even as he made the injection, Bagnall thought it a waste of precious drug: she wasn’t going to live. Her blood had already soaked the bandage. Maybe a hospital could have saved her, but here in the middle of a frozen nowhere… “Artzt!” he yelled in German. “Gibt es Artzt hier? Is there a doctor here?”
No one answered. He and Embry and the wounded woman might have been alone in the woods. She sighed as the morphia bit into her pain, took a couple of easy breaths, and died.
“She went out peacefully, anyhow,” Embry said; Bagnall realized the pilot hadn’t thought she’d make it, either. He’d done her the last favor he could by freeing her death from agony.
Bagnall said, “Now we have to think about staying alive ourselves.” In the middle of the cold woods, after a crushing defeat that showed only too clearly how the Lizards had seized and held great stretches of territory from the mightiest military machines the world had known, that seemed to require considerable thought.
Liu Han called, “Come and see the foreign devil do amazing things with stick and ball and glove. Come and see! Come and see!”
Mountebanks of all sorts could be sure of an audience in the Chinese refugee camp. Behind her, Bobby Fiore tossed into the air the leather-covered ball he’d had made. Instead of catching it in his hands, he tapped it lightly with his special stick-a bat, he called it. The ball went a couple of feet into the air, came straight down. He tapped it up again and again and again. All the while, he whistled a merry tune.
“See!” Liu Han pointed to him. “The foreign devil juggles without using his hands!”
A spattering of applause came from the crowd. Three or four people tossed coins into the bowl that lay by Liu Han’s feet. Some others set rice cakes and vegetables on the mat next to the bowl. Everyone understood that entertainers had to eat or they wouldn’t be able to entertain.
When no donations came for a minute or so, Bobby Fiore tapped the ball up one last time, caught it in his free hand, and glanced toward Liu Han. She looked out into the crowd and said, “Who will play a game where, if he wins, the foreign devil will look ridiculous? Who will try this simple game?”
Several men shouted and stepped toward her. Nothing delighted Chinese more than making a European or American into an object of ridicule. Liu Han pointed toward the bowl and the mat: If they wanted to play, they had to pay. A couple of them made their offerings without a word, but one asked belligerently, “What is this game?”
Bobby Fiore handed her the ball. She held it up in one hand, bent to pick up a flat canvas bag stuffed with rags which she displayed in the other. Then she put the bag back on the ground, gave the ball to the belligerent man. “A simple game, an easy game,” she said. “The foreign devil will stand well back and then run toward the bag. All you have to do is stand in front of it and touch him with the ball before he reaches it. Win and you get back your stake and twice as much besides.”