He got no answer. When he came to the Lowry Field turnoff, he stopped his bicycle and stood unmoving for two or three minutes. At last, he rode on toward the airfield. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, how close he’d come to choosing the other path.
15
Rain drummed down out of a leaden sky. Most of the leaves were off the trees in Pskova Park; they lay, brown and forlorn, on the yellow dying grass below. As George Bagnall walked toward the PskovKrom, he thought the bare-branched beeches and birches looked sad and miserable, like skeletons with their arms held high in surrender to approaching winter.
Sheets of water ran over the concrete slabs of the pavement. Rain collected in bomb craters, turning them to muddy little ponds. If you stepped into one, not watching where you were going, you could sink deeper than your waist-or deeper than your head. Two or three people had already drowned that way, or so rumor said.
The sentries at theKrom stood inside the entrance, both to keep dry and to keep the Lizards from spotting them from the air. Pskov’s ancient fortress had taken a couple of bombs in the early days of the Lizard invasion, but the aliens had pretty much left it alone since. Everyone in town hoped they would go right on doing that.
“Who comes?” the German sentry demanded, while his Soviet opposite number raised the barrel of his submachine gun. Bagnall swept back the hood on the rain cape he was wearing. “Ah, the Englishman,” the German said, first in his own language and then in Russian. The Soviet sentry nodded and gestured with his weapon: go ahead.
“Spasebo,”Bagnall said. His German, after months of intensive practice, was pretty fluent. His Russian wasn’t, so he used it whenever he could.
He went upstairs to the office of the local German commandant,Generalleutnant Kurt Chill. “Good day, Mr. Bagnall,” Chill said in excellent English. “Brigadiers German and Vasiliev, I fear, have not yet arrived. I thank you, at least, for being punctual.”
Bagnall shrugged. If you let Russian habits of punctuality get you down, you would go mad. “They’ll be here, General,” he said. And so they would, in five minutes or half an hour or a couple of hours. The concept of having0900 mean anything more than a way of sayingsometime this morning was beyond the Russian mental horizon.
The two partisan leaders showed up at twenty of ten. If they knew why Kurt Chill was gently steaming, they didn’t show it. “So,” Nikolai Vasiliev said, “let us discuss our moves against the imperialists from another world. We should be able to drive them back from Pskov while winter conditions prevail.” His comrade, Aleksandr German, translated Russian into Yiddish, which was close enough to German for Chill-and Bagnall-to understand.
On his own, Aleksandr German added, “They are weak in winter, weaker even than you Germans were that first year.”
Chill was used to such sniping, and gave as good as he got. “We were strong enough then to hold you out of Pskov,” he said with a chilly smile, “and we have got better since. My hope is that the Lizards will not do the same.”
“I think they probably won’t,” Bagnall said in German; Aleksandr German translated for Vasiliev. “They seem to do the same old things over and over.”
“Their old ones are quite bad enough,” Vasiliev said through Aleksandr German. “They are not imaginative fighters”-which was a hell of a thing for a Russian, the product of the world’s most rigid military system, to say-“but with their weapons and machines, they do not always need to be. We are lucky to have withstood them so long.”
“For them, this is a subsidiary front,” General Chill said. “Had they put full effort into it, they might well have overrun us.”
Nikolai Vasiliev puffed out his broad chest. With his dark, curly beard, he looked like a proud bandit chieftain-which in many ways he was. The flickering lamplight only added to the impression. But he was also a Soviet citizen and proud of it, for he said, “The marvelous bomb the Great Stalin touched off south of Moscow taught the Lizards better than to risk too much against us in any one place.”
Bagnall glanced over at Lieutenant General Chill. TheWehrmacht officer looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. The Germans set great store on their scientific ingenuity. To have to listen to someone he probably thought of as a SlavicUntermensch going on about the achievements of Soviet science had to be galling-and all the more so because the Nazis hadn’t matched that bomb.
Aleksandr German said, “We cannot count on the Lizards’ holding back forever. We need to force them to retreat wherever we can, to regain the soil of therodina, the motherland. General Chill, will our men fight side by side in this, as they have the past year and more?”Except when they were shooting at one another,Bagnall glossed silently to himself.
Despite that reservation, he looked for Chill to give hearty assent. Chill had better give his assent, if any planned winter offensive was to get anywhere. The Russians had more soldiers in Pskov than the Nazis did, but their men were armed with rifles and submachine guns and a few machine guns. The Germans were the ones who had the artillery, the lorries, the carefully husbanded panzers, the even more carefully husbanded petrol.
“I shall have to examine the overall strategic situation,” was what Chill did say. “Standing on the defensive until spring may prove a wiser, more economical choice.”
Vasiliev and Aleksandr German both shouted at him.Coward was one of the kinder words they used. Bagnall found himself speechless. Up till now, Chill had always been an aggressive commander, willing, even eager, to spend lives to gain territory. Of course, a lot of the lives he’d spent around Pskov were Russian…
Not only were a lot of the lives Chill had spent Russian, so was a lot of the materiel. The German garrison at Pskov had done plenty of hard fighting, and the Lizards in Poland cut them off from theVaterland (one of these days, he’d have to think about what the differences betweenrodina andVaterland implied, but not now, not now).
As innocently as he could, Bagnall asked, “How is your supply situation, General Chill?”
“Given all we have done, it is not bad,” Chill answered. Bagnall had heard a great many more responsive replies. The German officer’s face said more; it reminded Bagnall of the look a poker player wore when he’d got himself into a big hand and had to own up to holding nothing more ferocious than a pair of nines.
From strident, Aleksandr German’s voice went soft, persuasive: “Generalleutnant,supplies from the Soviet Union would probably be available. The routes and the amounts are not always what they might be, but they do exist. Surely your well-trained men would not have much trouble getting used to Soviet weapons.”
“Hardly-we captured enough of them on the way here,” Chill said with as much aplomb as he could muster: more than Bagnall had guessed he had in him. He was indeed a formidable man. When he continued, he cut straight to the heart of the problem: “If I take Soviet supplies and grow to depend on them to keep my force in being, then before long I have to take Soviet orders, too.”
“If you don’t, then before long you have no supplies and it no longer matters whose orders you take, because you won’t be able to carry them out in any case,” Aleksandr German said.
Nikolai Vasiliev’s eyes lit up with a fierce light. “And when you have no supplies left, no point to our truce any more, either. We will restore Pskov to therodina then, and we will remember what you have done here.”