A Pole raised a submachine gun and started to point it at him. Two of the fellow’s pals slapped the weapon down again. They believed the nail was a dead-man switch. Slowly, sullenly, they withdrew. One of them shook his fist at Mordechai. Anielewicz made as if to wave with the hand holding the nail. That got all the Poles moving faster.
He allowed himself a sigh of relief. This raid had fizzled. He owed Nesseref a big thank-you for getting him worried about Glowno. He wondered if he’d ever be able to explain that to her. He doubted it. Too bad, he thought.
Vyacheslav Molotov looked at his leading advisors. “Comrades, the Lizards have shown us a weakness we did not previously know they possessed. The question before us is, how can we most effectively exploit it?”
“It is not a military weakness, not in the strict sense of the words,” Georgi Zhukov observed. “I wish it were, but it is not.”
“Why do you say that, Georgi Konstantinovich?” Molotov asked.
“Because the Lizards’ military personnel are all males,” the Soviet marshal answered. “A ginger bomb at a front would not send them into a mating frenzy, as there would be no females close by to incite.”
Lavrenti Beria smiled. “Against the Lizards, ginger is not a military weapon-I agree with Georgi Konstantinovich. Rather, it is a weapon of terror, a weapon of subversion. I look forward to using it.”
Of course you do, Molotov thought. Is that the smile you wear when you do dreadful things to a young girl? He forced his mind back to the meeting. And of course you agree with Zhukov. If ginger is a weapon of subversion, it is a weapon for the NKVD, not the Red Army. Zhukov was careless, to renounce it so fast.
He turned to the foreign commissar. “Has anyone learned who fired the missiles at the Lizards’ Australian colony, Andrei Andreyevich?”
Gromyko sipped from a glass of sweet tea before shaking his head. “No, Comrade General Secretary, not with certainty-or, if the Lizards know, they are holding the information tight against their chests.”
“Lavrenti Pavlovich?” Molotov asked. Beria had channels Gromyko lacked.
But the chief of the NKVD shook his bald head. “Too many candidates. We did not do it; I know that. But the Nazis might have. The Americans might. And this is a more difficult problem than the massacre of the ships from the colonization fleet in orbit, because the British or the Japanese might also have done it.”
“In a way, I am glad we did not do it,” Molotov said. His colleagues nodded. All of them, even Beria, were at bottom prudes. Beria, Molotov suspected, got some of his vicious pleasure because of the strength of the rules he was breaking.
As Hitler had before him, Himmler made loud noises about the high moral tone of the Greater German Reich. Would that keep him from doing whatever he could to advance his interests? Molotov didn’t believe it for a minute. The Americans and British were decadent capitalists, so they would have few moral scruples. And the Japanese Empire had never shown scruples of any sort. Sure enough, the field was wide open.
Zhukov said, “For myself, I am sorry we did not think of it.” A leer spread over his broad peasant face. “I would have paid money to watch all the Lizards screwing their heads off. Serves them right for laughing at us for so long.”
Gromyko took another sip from his glass of tea. “It does disrupt them, as Lavrenti Pavlovich has said. But I wish whoever had this idea would have saved it till a critical moment instead of using it to make a nuisance of himself and no more.”
“Spoken like a good pragmatist,” Molotov said: high praise from him. He turned to Beria and Zhukov. “Would the wreckage from the missiles have given the Lizards some clues as to who did this?”
“Comrade General Secretary, anyone who would launch his own missiles at the Lizards is such a fool, he would deserve to get caught,” Beria said.
“I agree,” Zhukov said, not sounding happy about agreeing with Beria on anything. “But my colleagues in the Red Navy tell me it would not be so easy to fire a mongrel missile from a submarine. If anything went wrong, the missile might explode in its launch tube, which would destroy the ship.”
“Boat,” Gromyko said. “Submarines are called boats.”
“Submarines are toys for the devil’s grandson,” Zhukov retorted. He muttered something else. Molotov’s hearing wasn’t what it had been; he didn’t catch all of it. He did catch boats and damned civilians and a couple of new references to Satan’s near relations.
Gromyko might have heard all of Zhukov’s bad-tempered tirade, or he might have heard none of it. If he had heard, his face didn’t know about it. He said, “On the basis of geography, the Japanese are likeliest to be guilty.”
“Submarines are sneaky devils,” Zhukov said, apparently determined to disagree with the foreign commissar because Gromyko had presumed to correct him. “The new ones, the ones with atomic motors, hardly need to surface at all. And even a diesel boat ”-he gave Gromyko another sour look-“with a breathing tube could be a long, long way from Australia before it had to fuel.”
However spiteful that was, it was also true. “No evidence, then,” Molotov said. No one disagreed with him. He wished someone would have.
“Ginger bombs are not something over which the Lizards will start a war, as they would over atomic weapons.” Gromyko coughed. “No one goes to war because he is made too happy.”
Beria chuckled at that. Zhukov remained grumpy. Molotov asked, “Were the Lizards made so happy, they could not carry on? If happiness of that sort incapacitates them, they may well fight to prevent it.”
“I believe that to be so, Comrade General Secretary,” Beria said. “Signals intercepts indicate that they feared nuclear missiles following on the heels of the ones loaded with ginger.”
Zhukov nodded. If he was annoyed enough at Gromyko to take Beria’s side, Molotov would have to do something about that. Before he could speak, Zhukov added, “Intercepts also indicate that the Lizards’ fleetlord was in Australia during the ginger attack. That must have made them even jumpier than they would have been anyhow.”
“Are you certain?” Beria leaned forward. “I have received no such reports.”
Zhukov looked smug. “Sometimes military intelligence can do what ordinary spies cannot. This is why we have the GRU as well as the NKVD.”
Beria scribbled something on a notepad, then angrily tore off the sheet, ripped it to shreds, and threw it away. Molotov sat motionless. Inside, though, he was grinning from ear to ear. He hadn’t even needed to turn Zhukov and Beria against each other; they’d taken care of it for themselves. And a good thing, too, he thought. Anything he could do to keep the Red Army and the NKVD at odds with each other, he would. And if he didn’t have to… so much the better.
Gromyko coughed. “In another matter, I have heard that there was an attempt to hijack the nuclear bomb the Jews are said to have in Poland. I am given to understand that it failed.”
“Too bad,” Molotov said insincerely.
“Not necessarily,” Zhukov said. “Some of those Poles might want to use the bomb against us, not the Lizards.”
“That is an unpleasant thought,” Molotov said in the same tone of voice he’d used before. “Even so, the greater the instability within Poland, the greater the advantages for us.” Everyone nodded at that. Molotov added, “This merely proves the nationalists’ incompetence. Knowing them to be ineffective is valuable for us. Were they better at what they do, they would be more dangerous.”
“Were they better at what they do, they would be Nazis,” Gromyko said.
Molotov nodded. “Many of them would like to be Nazis. Many of them, in 1939, were even more reactionary than the Nazis. Spending a couple of years under German rule would have been a useful corrective for that. But they have been under Lizard control for a generation now: time enough to forget such lessons. They will cause the Lizards trouble one day before too long, and that means they will also cause trouble for the Germans and us.”