“I need to have an artillery barrage laid on,” Ludmila said, and explained what she’d seen moving up the forest track from the south. The German captain frowned. “I have no authority to commit artillery to action except in immediate defense of the front,” he said doubtfully. “Using it is dangerous, because Lizard counterbattery fire so often costs us guns and men, neither of which we can afford to lose.”
“I risked my life to get this information and bring it back here,” Ludmila said. “Are you going to sit there and ignore it?” The captain looked too clean and much too well-fed to have seen the front lines lately, no matter where Lieutenant General Chill was.
Instead of blowing up at her, he said, “If the matter is as important as all that, Senior Lieutenant, I suggest you take it to the Englishmen down the hall.” He pointed out the direction. “In the absence of the commander, they have the power to bind and to loose.” He sounded like a man quoting something. If he was, Ludmila didn’t recognize it. He also sounded like a man unhappy about command arrangements. He didn’t need to be happy, though-he just had to obey. Germans were supposed to be good at that.
“Yes, I’ll try them, thank you,” Ludmila said, and hurried out.
All three of the Englishmen were in their map-bedecked office, along with a blond woman in Red Army uniform, a rifle with telescopic sight slung on her back. She was so decorative, Ludmila doubted at first that she had any right to the uniform and sniper’s weapon. A second glance at the woman’s eyes changed her mind. She’d seen enough action herself to recognize others who had done likewise.
One of the Englishmen-Jones-had his hand on her shoulder. She stood close to him, but she was watching the one called Bagnall, the one Ludmila had met in the park when she first came to Pskov. She felt as if she’d walked into something out ofAnna Karenina, not a place where battles got planned.
But Ken Embry, the third Englishman, saw her and said,“Chto- What?” His Russian remained on the rudimentary side. Even so, he attracted the others’ attention to Ludmila. Jones jerked his hand away from the woman’s shoulder as if she’d suddenly become red-hot.
Best, probably, for Ludmila to pretend she hadn’t seen anything. What the Englishmen did in their private lives was their private business, although she wished they hadn’t brought their private lives with them to theKrom. In German interspersed with Russian, Ludmila explained what she’d seen and what she’d wanted. George Bagnall translated her words into English.
“Come to the map,” he said in German when he was done. He pointed to the forests south of Pskov. “Where exactly did you see these lorries, and how long ago?”
She studied the map. It made her slightly nervous; in the Soviet Union, maps were secret things, not to be shown to the generality. She pointed. “It was here, west of this pond. I am sure of it. And it was”-she glanced at the watch strapped to her left wrist-“twenty-three minutes ago. I came in to report as soon as I saw them.”
George Bagnall smiled at her. By Russian standards, his face was long, thin, and bony. He was not, to Ludmila’s way of thinking, a particularly handsome man, but that smile lit up his face. He said, “You did well to note the exact time, and to get back to Pskov so fast.”
After that, he dropped back into English to talk with his comrades. Ludmila, who had no English, at first thought that rude. Then she realized the RAF men had business to do and needed their own language for it. Her irritation faded.
Bagnall returned to the same mixture of German and Russian that Ludmila used: “By the time we can get the guns to open up, the lorries will be almost to the Lizards’ front line-do you see?” He drew their probable track up to the line south of Pskov marked in red ink. Seeing Ludmila’s disappointed expression, he went on, “But the Lizards may not be done unloading them. A few shells might do us some good. Wait here.”
He left the map chamber, returning a few minutes later with a different sort of smile on his face. “Captain Dolger does not approve of us, but he is a good soldier. If he is ordered to do something, it will get done.”
Sure enough, within a couple of minutes field guns off to the north and east of Pskov began hammering away in the short, intense bombardment that seemed best calculated to hit the Lizards. They shifted position before counterbattery fire could wreak full havoc.
And sure enough, Ludmila heard incoming rounds hard on the heels of the last outgoing ones. “I hope they managed to move their cannon,” she said, and then shook her head. “Hoping anything good for the Germans still feels wrong to me.” Saying that in German felt wrong to her, too. She repeated it in Russian.
The woman with the sniping rifle nodded emphatically. In fair Russian of his own, Jones, the youngest Englishman, said, “For us also. Remember, we were at war with the Hitlerites for almost two years before the Soviet Union joined that fight.”
Ludmila did remember. For those almost two years, in the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany could do no wrong. It was dealing blow after blow to the imperialist powers… until it dealt a blow to the Soviet Union that almost wrecked it forever. Ludmila said, “They are our allies against the Lizards. I try to forget everything but that. I try-but it is not easy.”
“No, it is not easy,” George Bagnall said. “Things I’ve seen here, things I saw in France, make me glad we were dropping bombs on Jerry’s head. And yet the Nazis give the Lizards a thin time of it. Very strange.”
Most of that had been in German, but the blond Russian woman understood enough of it to say, “Nobody says the Nazis cannot fight. Or if anyone does say it, it is a lie; we have all seen enough to know better. But they do not think why they fight. Someone tells them what to do, and they do it well. And for what? For Hitlerism!” Her cornflower-blue eyes blazed contempt.
No one argued with her. A couple of minutes later, Captain Dolger came running into the room. His fleshy, handsome face glowed. “Field telephones from the front say our artillery touched off secondary explosions-some of those lorries were carrying shells.” Bagnall had told him what to do, and he’d done it well.
The blonde with the rifle threw her arms around Bagnall and kissed him on the mouth. Captain Dolger coughed; he left the Englishmen’s office as fast as he’d come in. Jerome Jones flushed till he looked like a boiled crayfish. Ludmila turned away, embarrassed. Such behavior by a Soviet woman was uncultured in the extreme.
She expected Bagnall to take all he could get from the shameless sniper. For one thing, men were like that. For another, he was an Englishman, therefore a capitalist, therefore an exploiter. But he broke the kiss as soon as he decently could, and looked as embarrassed about it as Ludmila felt.
She scratched her head. Bagnall wasn’t behaving the way school had taught her Englishmen were supposed to behave. What did that say about her lessons? She didn’t really know, but the more you looked at things, the more complicated they got.
Jens Larssen pedaled wearily into Hanford, Washington. He stopped in the middle of the main street. “God, what a dump,” he muttered. He could see why the physicists back at the Met Lab had been hot for the place. He could hear the murmur and splash of the Columbia as it flowed by next to the town. It was all the river anybody could ask for, and he knew what the Mississippi was like.
Not only that, the place already had a railroad line coming into it from the north: the train station was much the biggest building in town. No tracks came out of Hanford going south; it was the end of the line.In more ways than one, Jens thought. But the railroad line was a point in favor of the place. With it, you could conveniently move stuff in and out. Without it, that wouldn’t have been so easy.
River and railroad: two big pluses. Everything else, as far as Jens could see, was a minus. Hanford couldn’t have held more than a few hundred people. Any major industrial activity here would stand out like a sore thumb. Hanford didn’t have any major industries. Just to make up for it, Hanford didn’t have any minor industries, either. If it suddenly developed some, the Lizards couldn’t help but notice.