Tatiana followed. As the RAP men were about to help drag the boat into the water, she kissed each of them in turn. The villagers muttered among themselves in incomprehensible Estonian. A couple of men guffawed. That was understandable. So were the loud sniffs from a couple of women.
“You’re certain you won’t come with us?” Bagnall said. Tatiana shook her head yet again. She turned around and tramped south without looking back. She knew what she intended to do, and had to know the likely consequences of it.
“Come,” the fisherman said. The RAF men scrambled aboard with him. The rest of the villagers finished pushing the boat into the sea. He opened the fire door to the steam engine and started throwing in wood and peat and what looked like chunks of dried horse manure. Shaking his head, he went on, “Ought to burn coal. Can’t get coal. Burn whatever I get.”
“We know a few verses to that song,” Bagnall said. The fisherman chuckled. The boat had probably been slow burning its proper fuel. It was slower now, and the smoke that poured from its stack even less pleasant than the smudges from Kohtla-Jarve. But the engine ran. The boat sailed. Barring the Lizards’ strafing them from the air, Finland was less than a day away.
“Oh, Jager, dear,” Otto Skorzeny said in scratchy falsetto. Heinrich Jager looked up in surprise; he hadn’t heard Skorzeny come up. The SS man laughed at him. “Stop mooning over that Russian popsy of yours and pay attention. I need something from you.”
“She isn’t a popsy,” Jager said. Skorzeny laughed louder. The panzer colonel went on, “If she were a popsy, I don’t suppose I’d be mooning over her.”
The half admission got through to Skorzeny, who nodded. “All right, something to that. But even if she’s the Madonna, stop mooning over her. You know our friends back home have sent us a present, right?”
“Hard not to know it,” Jager agreed. “More of you damned SS men around than you can shake a stick at, every stinking one of them with a Schmeisser and a look in his eye that says he’d just as soon shoot you as give you the time of day. I’ll bet I even know what kind of present it is, too.” He didn’t say what kind of present he thought it was, not because he believed he might be wrong but from automatic concern for security.
“I’ll bet you do,” Skorzeny said. “Why shouldn’t you? You’ve known about this stuff as long as I have, ever since those days outside Kiev.” He said no more after that, but it was plenty. They’d stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in the Ukraine.
“What are you going to do with-it?” Jager asked cautiously.
“Are you thick in the head?” Skorzeny demanded. “I’m going to blow the kikes in Lodz to hell and gone, is what I’m going to do, and their chums the Lizards, and all the poor damned Poles in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He laughed again. “There’s the story of Poland in a sentence,nicht wahr? The poor damned Poles, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I presume you have authorization for this?” Jager said, not presuming any such thing. If anybody could lay hands on an atomic bomb for his own purposes, Otto Skorzeny was the man.
But not this time. Skorzeny’s big head went up and down. “You bet your arse I do: from theReichsfuhrer-SS and straight from the Fuhrer himself. Both of ’em in my attache case. You want to gape at fancy autographs?”
“Never mind.” In a way, Jager was relieved-if Himmler and Hitler had signed off on this, at least Skorzeny wasn’t running wild… or no wilder than usual, at any rate. Still-“Strikes me as a waste of a bomb. There’s nothing threatening coming out of Lodz. Look what happened the last time the Lizards even tried sending something up our way through the town: it got here late and chewed up, thanks to what happened down there.”
“Oh, yes, the Jews did us a hell of a favor.” Skorzeny rolled his eyes. “When they hit the Lizards, the bastards all wore German uniforms, so they didn’t get blamed for it-we did. I did in particular, as a matter of fact. The Lizards bribed a couple of Poles with scope-sighted rifles to come up here and go Skorzeny-hunting to see if they could pay me back.”
“You’re still here,” Jager noted.
“You noticed that, did you?” Skorzeny made as if to kiss him on the cheek. “You’re such a clever boy. And both the Poles are dead, too. It took a while-we know to the zloty how big their payoff was.” His smile showed teeth; maybe he was remembering how the Poles perished. But then he looked grim. “Lieutenant-Colonel Brockelmann is dead, too. Unlucky son of a whore happened to be about my size. One of the Poles blew off the top of his head from behind at about a thousand meters. Damn fine shooting, I must say. I complimented the fellow on it as I handed him his trigger finger.”
“I’m sure he appreciated that,” Jager said dryly. Associating with Skorzeny had rubbed his nose in all the uglier parts of warfare, the parts he hadn’t had to think about as a panzer commander. Mass murder, torture… he hadn’t signed up for those. But they were part of the package whether he’d signed up for them or not. Was destroying a city where the people were doing theReich more good than harm? Was their being Jews reason enough? Was their having piqued Skorzeny for not letting him destroy them on his first try reason enough? He’d have to think about that-and he couldn’t waste too much time doing it, either. Meanwhile, he asked, “So what am I supposed to do about all this? What’s the favor you have in mind? I’ve never been into Lodz, you know.”
“Oh, yes, I know that.” Skorzeny stretched like a tiger deciding he was too full to go hunting right now. “If you had been in Lodz, you’d be talking with theSicherheitsdienst or theGestapo now, not me.”
“I’ve talked with them before.” Jager shrugged, trying not to show the stab of alarm he felt.
“I know that, too,” Skorzeny answered. “But they would be asking more-pointed questions this time, and using more pointed tools. Never mind all that. I don’t want you to go into Lodz.” The tiger became more alert. “I’m not sure I’d trust you to go into Lodz. I want you to lay on a diversionary attack, make the Lizards look someplace else, while I trundle on down the road with my band of elves and make like St. Nicholas.”
“Can’t do it tomorrow. If that’s what you have in mind,” Jager answered promptly-and truthfully. “Every time we fight, it hurts us worse than the Lizards, a lot worse. You know that. We’re sort of putting things back together here right now, bringing up new panzers, new men, getting somewhere close-well, closer-to establishment strength. Give me a week or ten days.”
He expected Skorzeny to blow up, to demand action yesterday if not sooner. But the SS man surprised him-Skorzeny spent a lot of time surprising him-by nodding. “That’s fine. I still have some arrangements of my own to work out. Even for elves, hauling in a bloody big crate takes a bit of planning. I’ll let you know when I need you.” He thumped Jager on the back. “Now you can go back to thinking about your Russian with her clothes off.” He walked away, laughing till he wheezed.
“What the devil was all that in aid of, sir?” Gunther Grillparzer asked.
“The devil indeed.” Jager glanced toward the panzer gunner, whose eyes followed Skorzeny as if he were some cinema hero. “He’s found some new reasons for getting a bunch of us killed, Gunther.”
“Wunderbar!”Grillparzer said with altogether unfeigned enthusiasm, leaving Jager to contemplate the vagaries of youth. He came up with a twisted version of the Book of Ecclesiastes: vagary of vagaries, all is vagary. It seemed as good a description of real life as the more accurate reading.
“Ah, good to see you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Iosef Stalin said as Molotov entered his Kremlin office.
“And you, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov answered. Stalin had a purr in his voice that Molotov hadn’t heard in a long time: not since just after the previous Soviet atomic bomb, as best he could remember. The last time he’d heard it before that was when the Red Army threw the Nazis back from the gates of Moscow at the end of 1941. It meant Stalin thought things were looking up for the time being.