In the Balance (39 page)

As usual, he carefully examined the documents the Germans produced, compared photographs to faces. Jäger was certain that if he ever forgot his papers, the sergeant would not pass him through even though he recognized him. Breaking routine was not something the Russians did well.

Today, though, he and Schultz had everything in order. The sergeant started to stand aside to pass them through when someone else came trotting across Red Square toward the checkpoint. Jäger turned to see who was in such a tearing hurry. As he did, his mouth fell open. “I’ll be Goddamned,” Schultz said, which about summed things up.

Unlike the tankmen, the fellow approaching wore a German uniform—an SS uniform at that—and wore it with panache. His every aggressive stride seemed to warn that anyone who gave him trouble would have a thin time of it. He was tall and broadshouldered and would have been handsome had a scar not seamed his left cheek. Actually, he was handsome anyhow, in a piratical sort of way.

Instead of bristling at him as Jäger had expected, the Russian guards grinned and nudged each other. The sergeant said, “Papers?”

The SS man drew himself up to his full impressive height. “Stuff your papers, and stuff you, too!” he said in a deep, booming voice. His German held an Austrian accent. The sentries practically hugged themselves with glee. The sergeant came to an attention stiffer than he might have granted Marshal Zhukov, waved the big bruiser into the Kremlin.

“Why didn’t we ever try that?” Schultz said admiringly.

“I don’t have the balls for it,” Jäger admitted.

The SS man spun toward them. For all his size, he was light on his feet. “So you are Germans after all,” he said. “I thought you might be, but what with those rag-pickers’ getups, I couldn’t be sure till you opened your
mouths. Who the devil are you, anyway?”

“Major Heinrich Jäger, Sixteenth Panzer,” Jager answered crisply. “Here is my tank gunner, Sergeant Georg Schultz. And now,
Herr Hauptsturmführer
, I might ask you the same question.” The SS rank was the equivalent of captain; however much brass this fellow had, Jager was his superior.

The SS man’s brace was almost as rigid—and as full of parody—as the Soviet sergeant’s had been. Clicking his heels, he declared in falsetto, “SS
Hauptsturmführer
Otto Skorzeny begs leave to report his presence, sir!”

Jäger snorted. The scar on Skorzeny’s cheek partly froze the left corner of his mouth and turned his smile into something twisted. Jäger asked him, “What are you doing here, especially in that suit? You’re lucky the Ivans haven’t decided to take your nose and ears.”

“Nonsense,” Skorzeny said. If he ever had doubts about anything, he didn’t show them in public. “Russians only know how to be one of two things: masters or slaves, if you convince them you’re the master, what does that leave them?”

“If,” Georg Schultz murmured, too softly for the SS man to hear.

“You still haven’t said why you’re here,” Jäger persisted.

“I am acting under orders from—” Skorzeny hesitated; Jäger guessed he’d been about to say
from Berlin
. He resumed: “from my superiors. Can you say the same?” He gave Jäger’s Russian suit a fishy stare.

Beside Jäger, Schultz stirred angrily. Jäger wondered if this arrogant
Hauptsturmführer
had ever seen action that required him to get those polished boots dirty. But that question answered itself: Skorzeny wore the ribbon for a wound badge between the first and second buttons of his tunic. All right, he had some idea of what was real, then. And his counterquestion made Jäger think—what
would
the authorities have to say about how he was working with the Red Army?

He briefly summarized how he had come to be in Moscow. Maybe Skorzeny had done some fighting, but could he say he’d taken out a Lizard panzer? Not many had, and not many of those who had still lived.

When he was through, the SS man nodded. Now he blustered less. “You might say we’re both in Moscow for the same reason, then, Major, whether with official approval or without. We have a common interest in showing the Ivans how to make themselves more effective foes for the Lizards.”

“Ah,” Jäger said. Just as the Soviets no longer treated Germans caught on Russian soil as prisoners of war (or worse), the surviving pieces of the government of the
Reich
must have decided to do their best to keep the Russians in the fight now and worry about their being Bolshevik Slavic
Untermenschen
later.

The three Germans walked together toward the Kremlin. The heart of
Soviet Russia still wore the camouflage it had donned after the Russo-German war began. Its bulging onion domes, an architecture alien and oriental to Jäger’s eyes, had their gilding covered over with battleship gray paint. Walls were mottled with patches of black and orange, yellow and brown, rather like the hide of a leprous giraffe, to confuse attackers from the air.

Such tricks had not entirely spared it from damage. Stolid, wide-shouldered women in shawls and drab dresses carried bricks and chunks of wood away from a recent bomb hit. The sick-sweet stink of day before yesterday’s battlefield hung over the place. That smell always made Jäger’s heart beat faster in remembered fear.

Skorzeny grunted and put a hand over the right side of his belly. Jäger thought the SS man’s reaction similar to his own until he realized Skorzeny’s face held real pain. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My fucking gall bladder,” the
Hauptsturmführer
answered. “It had me in the hospital for a while earlier this year. But the doctors say it isn’t going to kill me, and lying around on my backside is a bloody bore, so here I am up and doing again. A good thing, too.”

“You were here on the Eastern Front before, sir?” Georg Schultz asked.

“Yes, with
Das Reich,”
Skorzeny said.

Schultz nodded and said nothing more. Jäger could guess what he was thinking. A lot of people who saw action on the Eastern Front would fall down on their knees and thank God for an illness that got them sent back to Germany and safety. Skorzeny, by the way he talked, would sooner have stayed and fought. He didn’t sound as though he were bluffing, either. Jäger’s respect for him went up a notch.

In spite of the Lizards’ air raids, the Kremlin still swarmed with life. Occasional holes merely showed Jäger the soldiers and bureaucrats bustling about within, in the same way as he could have seen the humming life inside an anthill with its top kicked off.

He was not surprised to find Skorzeny heading for the same doorway as he and Jäger used: naturally, the SS man would also be meeting with officers from the Defense Commissariat. The doorway into the Kremlin itself, like the one into the compound around it, was guarded. The lieutenant who headed this detachment put out his hand without a word. Without a word, Jäger and Schultz gave him their documents. Without a word, he studied and returned them.

Then he turned to Skorzeny, his hand still outstretched. An impish grin lit the big man’s face. He seized the Russian lieutenant’s hand, vigorously pumped it up and down. The guards stared in disbelief. The lieutenant managed to return a sickly smile. A couple of his men had raised their submachine guns. When he smiled, they lowered them again.

“Talk about balls, one of these days he’s going to get his blown off,
playing games like that,” Schultz said out of the side of his mouth.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Jäger answered. He’d known a few people who simply bulled their way through life, charging at the world with such headlong aggression that it gave way before them. Skorzeny seemed to be of that stripe. On a larger scale, so did Adolf Hitler … and Stalin.

It was easier to think of the Soviet leader than of Hitler as Jäger let the immensity of the Kremlin swallow him and Schultz. Skorzeny followed. Just inside the doorway stood a pair of Russian lieutenant colonels: no Germans would go wandering unescorted through the Red Army’s holy of holies.

One of the Russian officers wore a tankman’s black collar patches. “Good morning, Major Jäger, Sergeant Schultz,” he said in excellent German.

“Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov,” Jäger said, nodding back politely. Viktor Kraminov had been assigned to Schultz and him since they came to Moscow. They might have traded shots with each other the year before, for Kraminov had been part of Marshal Budenny’s southern Soviet army before being transferred to staff duty in Moscow. He had an old man’s wise eyes set in a face of childlike innocence, and knew more about handling panzers than Jäger would have expected from the Russians’ battle performance.

The other lieutenant colonel, a fellow Jager had not seen before, wore green collar patches. Georg Schultz frowned. “What’s green stand for?” he whispered.

Jäger needed a minute to think. Russian infantry patches were maroon; tanks, artillery, and engineers black; cavalry dark blue; air force light blue. But what Soviet service wore green as its
Waffenfarbe?
Jäger stiffened. “He’s NKVD,” he whispered back.

Schultz flinched. Jäger didn’t blame him. Just as no Russian soldier would want to run across the
Gestapo
, so the Germans naturally grew nervous at the sight of an officer of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior, if he’d come across the NKVD man a year ago, he would have shot him at once; German orders were to take no secret policemen or political commissars alive, regardless of the laws of war.

After one brief glance, the NKVD lieutenant colonel ignored the two Germans in civilian clothes; he’d been waiting for Otto Skorzeny. “A very good day to you,
Herr Hauptsturmführer,”
he said. His German was even better than Kraminov’s. He sounded fussily precise, like about half of Jäger’s old
Gymnasium
teachers.

“Hello, Boris, you skinny old prune-faced bastard,” Skorzeny boomed back. Jäger waited for the heavens to fall. The NKVD man, who really was a skinny old prune-faced bastard, just gave a tight little nod, from which
Jäger inferred he’d been working with Skorzeny for a while and had decided he’d better make allowances.

The NKVD man—Boris—turned toward Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov. “Perhaps all five of us will work together today,” he said. “In chatting before you gentlemen arrived, Viktor Danielovich and I discovered that we all may be able to contribute to an operation which will benefit both our nations.”

“It is as Lieutenant Colonel Lidov says,” Kraminov agreed. “Cooperation here will aid both the Soviet Union and the
Reich
against the Lizards.”

“You mean you want German help for something you don’t think you can do on your own,” Skorzeny said. “Why do you need us for an operation which I presume will be on Soviet soil?” His gaze came to a sudden, sharp focus. “Wait! It’s on territory we took from you last year, isn’t it?”

“That may be,” Lidov said. The noncommittal reply convinced Jäger that Skorzeny was right. He made a mental note: the SS man might bluster, but he was anything but stupid. Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov evidently saw dissimulation was useless, too. He sighed, perhaps regretting it. “Come, all of you.”

The Germans followed the two Russian officers down the long, high-ceilinged halls of the Kremlin. Other Russian soldiers sometimes paused in their own duties to stare at Skorzeny’s SS uniform, but no one said anything: they seemed to accept that the world had grown stranger these past few months.

The office Jäger and Schultz entered was not the one Kraminov used. Like Kraminov’s, though, it was surprisingly light and airy, with a large window that gave a view of thegrounds of the Kremlin compound. Jäger had looked for nothing but dank gloom at the heart of Soviet Russia, but a moment’s reflection after finding the opposite told him that was silly. Even Communists needed light by which to work. And the Kremlin was far older than either Communism or electricity; when it was raised, the only light worth having came from the sun. So, large windows.

Lieutenant Colonel Lidov pointed to a samovar. “Tea,
tovarishchii?”
he asked. Jäger frowned; Kraminov didn’t call Schultz and him “comrades,” as if they were Reds themselves. But then, Kraminov was a tankman, a warrior, not NKVD. At home, Jäger drank coffee thick with cream. But he hadn’t been at home for a long time. He nodded.

Lidov poured for all of them. At home, Jäger didn’t drink tea from a glass, either. He had done that before, though, with captured samovar sets in steppe towns and collective farms overrun by
the Wehrmacht
. Lidov brewed better tea than he’d had there.

The NKVD man set down his glass. “To business,” he said. Jäger leaned
forward and looked attentive. Georg Schultz just sat where he was. Skorzeny slouched down in his chair and looked bored. If that disconcerted Lidov, he didn’t let it show.

“To business,” he repeated. “As the
Hauptsturmführer
has suggested, the proposed action will take place in an area where the, fascist invaders had established themselves prior to the arrival of the alien imperialist aggressors commonly known as Lizards.”

Jäger wondered if Lidov talked that way all the time. Skorzeny yawned. “By fascist invaders, I presume you mean us Germans.” He sounded as bored as he looked.

“You and your lackeys and running dogs, yes.” Maybe Lidov did talk that way all the time. However he talked, he didn’t retreat a centimeter, though Skorzeny could have broken him over his knee like a stick. “To resume, then: along with bands of gallant Soviet partisans, German remnant groups remain in the area under discussion. Thus the apparent expedience of a joint Soviet-German operation.”

“Where
is
the area in question?” Jäger asked.

“Ah,” Lidov said. “Attend the map here, if you please.” He stood up, pointed to one of the charts tacked onto the wall. The lettering, of course, was Cyrillic, but Jäger recognized the Ukraine anyhow. Red pins showed Soviet positions, blue ones surviving German units, and yellow the Lizards. The map had more yellow measles than Jäger liked.

Lidov went on, “We are particularly concerned with this area north and west of Kiev, near the town of Komarin. There, early in the struggle against the Lizards, you Germans succeeded in wrecking with heavy artillery two major ships of the common enemy.”