Ludmila Gorbunova asked, “Will he have men he can recruit here in Lodz, or is he all alone in this city?”

Anielewicz looked to Jager. Jager shrugged again. “This town was under the rule of theReich for some time before the Lizards came. Are there still Germans here?”

“From the days when it was Litzmannstadt, you mean?” Mordechai asked, and shook his head without waiting for an answer. “No, after the Lizards came, we made most of the Aryan colonists pack up and go. The Poles did the same thing with them. And do you know what? We don’t miss the Germans a bit, either.”

Jager looked at him steadily. Anielewicz felt himself flushing. If any man alive was entitled to score points off a German soldier, he was.A German soldier, yes, but notthis German soldier. If it hadn’t been forthis German soldier, he wouldn’t be hereto score points. He had to remember that, no matter how hard it was.

“Not many Germans, eh?” Jager said matter-of-factly. “If any are left, Skorzeny will find them. And he’ll probably have connections among the Poles. They don’t like you Jews, either.”

Was he trying to score points, too? Mordechai couldn’t be sure. Even if he was, that didn’t make him wrong. Ludmila said, “But the Poles. If they help Skorzeny, they’ll be blowing themselves up, too.”

“You know that,” Jager said. “I know that. But the Poles don’t necessarily know it. If Skorzeny says, ‘Here, I have a big bomb hidden that will blow up all the Jews but not you,’ they’re liable to believe him.”

“He’s a good liar?” Anielewicz asked, trying to get more of a feel for his opponent than he could from the unending propaganda theReich pumped out about Skorzeny.

But Jager might have been part of Gobbels’ propaganda mill. “He’s good at everything that has to do with being a raider,” he answered with no trace of irony, then proceeded to give an example: “He went into Besancon, for instance, with a sack of ginger to bribe the Lizards, and he came out driving one of their panzers.”

“I do not believe this,” Ludmila said, before Anielewicz could. “I heard it reported on German shortwave wireless, but I do not believe it.”

“It’s true whether you believe it or not,” Jager said. “I was there. I saw his head sticking up out of the driver’s hatch. I didn’t believe he could do it, either, I thought he was going in there to commit suicide, nothing more. I was wrong. I have never underestimated him since.”

Anielewicz took that evaluation, which he found almost too depressing to contemplate, to Solomon Gruver and Bertha Fleishman. Gruver’s mouth turned down at the corners, making him look even gloomier than he usually did. “He can’t be that good,” the former sergeant said. “If he were that good, he’d be God, and he isn’t. He’s just a man.”

“We have to put our ears to the ground among the Poles,” Bertha said. “If anything is going on with them, we need to hear about it fast as we can.”

Mordechai sent her a grateful look. She took this whole business as seriously as he did. Given the levelheadedness she usually displayed, that was a sign it needed to be taken seriously.

“So we listen. So what?” Gruver said. “If he’s that good, we won’t hear anything. We won’t spot him unless he wants to be spotted, and we won’t know what he’s up to till he decides to hit us.”

“All of which is true, and none of which means we can stop trying,” Anielewicz said. He slammed his open hand into the side of the fire engine. That hurt his hand more than the engine. “If only I’d been certain I recognized him! If only I’d come out of-where I came out of-a few seconds earlier, so I could have seen his face. If, If, if-” It ate at him.

“Even thinking he was in Lodz put us on alert,” Bertha said. “Who knows what he might have done if he’d got here without our knowing it?”

“He turned a corner,” Anielewicz said, running it through his mind again like a piece of film from the cinema. “He turned a corner, and then another one, very quickly. The second time, I had to guess which way he’d gone, and I guessed wrong.”

“Don’t keep beating yourself over the head with it, Mordechai,” Bertha said. “It can’t be helped now, and you did everything you could.”

“That’s so,” Gruver rumbled. “No doubt about it”

Anielewicz hardly heard him. He was looking at Bertha Fleishman. She’d never called him by his first name before, not that he remembered. He would have remembered, too; he was certain of that.

She was looking at him, too. She flushed a little when their eyes met, but she didn’t look away. He’d known she liked him well enough. He liked her well enough, too. Except when she smiled, she was plain and mousy. He’d been to bed with women far prettier. He suddenly seemed to hear Solomon Gruver’s deep voice again, going,So what? Gruver-that-wasn’t had a point. He’d bedded those women and enjoyed himself doing it, but he hadn’t for an instant thought of spending his life with any of them. Bertha, though…

“If we live through this-” he said. The five words made a complete sentence. If you knew how to listen to them.

Bertha Fleishman did. “Yes. If we do,” she replied: a complete answer.

The real Solomon Gruver seemed less attentive to what was going on around him than the imaginary one inside Anielewicz’s head. “If we live through this,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something better with that thing we have than leaving it where it is. But if we move it now, we just draw attention to it, and that lets this Skorzenymamzer have his chance.”

“That’s all true, Solomon-every word of it,” Mordechai agreed solemnly. Then he started to laugh. A moment later, so did Bertha.

“And what is so funny?” Gruver demanded with ponderous dignity. “Did I make a joke and, God forbid, not know it?”

“God forbid,” Anielewicz said, and laughed harder.

As George Bagnall and Ken Embry walked to Dover College, jet engines roared overhead. Bagnall’s automatic reaction was to find the nearest hole in the ground and jump into it. With an effort, he checked himself and looked upward. For once, the thinking, rational part of his brain had got it right: those were Meteors up there, not Lizard fighter-bombers.

“Bloody hell!” Embry burst out; conditioned reflex must nearly have got the better of him, too. “We’ve only been gone a year and a half, but it feels as though we’ve stepped back into 1994, not 1944.”

“Doesn’t it just,” Bagnall agreed. “They were flying those things when we left, but not many of them. You don’t see Hurricanes at all any more, and they’re phasing out Spitfires fast as they can. It’s a brave new world, and no mistake.”

“Still a place for bomber crew-for the next twenty minutes, anyhow,” Embry said. “They haven’t put jets on Lancs, not yet they haven’t. But everything else they have done-” He shook his head. “No wonder they sent us back to school. We’re almost as obsolete as if we’d been flying Sopwith Camels. Trouble is, of course, we haven’t been flyinganything.”

“It’s even worse for Jones,” Bagnall said. “We’re still flying the same buses, even if they have changed the rest of the rules. His radars are starting to come from a different world: literally.”

“Same with our bomb-aiming techniques,” Embry said as they climbed the poured-concrete steps and strode down the corridor toward their classroom.

The lecturer there, a flight lieutenant named Constantine Jordan, was already scribbling on the blackboard, though it still lacked a couple of minutes of the hour. Bagnall looked around as he took his seat. Most of his classmates had a pale, pasty look to them; some were in obvious if stifled pain. That made sense-besides the rarities like Bagnall and Embry, the people who’d been out of service long enough to require refresher courses were the ones who’d been badly wounded. A couple had dreadful scars on their faces; what lay under their uniforms was anyone’s guess, though not one Bagnall cared to make.