The Croats straggled away. A few minutes later, they started coming back with Lizard prisoners, first the males who had given up as the fighting ebbed and then, on makeshift litters, the crudely bandaged ones wounds had forced out of combat. Their sounds of pain were unpleasantly close to the ones men made.
“I wasn’t sure you’d get away with that,” Jager murmured to Skorzeny.
“You have to make it personal,” Skorzeny whispered back. “These bastards take everything personally. I just played their game with them, and I won.” His smile was smug as he added one final word: “Again.”
Georg Schultz said, “I figured I’d get into Moscow one way or another, but I never guessed what those ways would be-first you flew me in, and now I’m retreating into it.”
“It isn’t funny.” Ludmila Gorbunova tore a chunk of black bread with her teeth. Someone handed her a glass of ersatz tea. She gulped it down. Someone else gave her a bowl of shchi. She gulped the cabbage soup, too. While she refueled herself, groundcrew men took care of her aircraft, pouring petrol into it, loading on light bombs, and stowing the belts of machine-gun ammunition Schultz had filled.
“I never said it was funny,” the German said. He looked worn unto death, his skin gray rather than fair, his hair and beard unkempt, grease on his face and tunic-no one had much chance to wash these days. Purple pouches lay under his eyes.
Ludmila was sure she was no more prepossessing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had more than a couple of hours of sleep at a stretch. Even before the Kaluga line began to unravel, she’d been desperately overtaxed. Since then…
The cry was buy time. When the Germans neared Moscow in 1941, old men, boys, and tens of thousands of women had dug trenches and antitank obstacles to slow their progress. They were out again. How much good their bathers would do against the Lizards when stronger ones had already failed was questionable, but the Soviet capital would not fall without as much of a fight as the Soviet people could put up.
“Ready, Comrade Pilot,” one of the groundcrew men shouted.
Ready or not, Ludmila put down the bowl of shchi-thin, watery stuff, without ham or salami, and without enough cabbage, too-and got up. She climbed wearily into the U-2 biplane. Georg Schultz said, “I hope you come back. I hope we’re still here when you come back.”
Nikifor Sholudenko walked up just in time to hear the panzer-gunner-turned-mechanic say that. The NKVD man bristled. “The penalty for defeatist talk is death,” he said.
Schultz rounded on him. “What’s the penalty for killing the only decent technician this base has?” he retorted. “You do that, you do more to make your side lose than I do by talking.”
“This may be true,” Sholudenko said, “but there is no fixed sentence for it.” His hand fell to the Tokarev pistol he wore on his hip.
Ludmila knew each of them wanted the other dead. Loudly, she said, “Spin my prop, one of you. Save your war with each other until after we’ve held off the Lizards.” If we hold off the Lizards, she added to herself. Had she said that aloud, she wondered whether Sholudenko would have come down on her for defeatism. Probably not. He didn’t want to see her dead-only naked.
The NKVD man and the ex-Wehrmacht sergeant both sprang toward the front of the Kukuruznik Schultz got there first. When he yanked at the prop, Sholudenko had to back way; walking into a spinning prop blade would kill you as surely as a pistol, and a lot more messily.
Buzz! The prop caught; the five-cylinder radial engine spat out acrid exhaust fumes. Ludmila released the brake. The U-2 bounded over the rough airstrip (not really a strip at all, just a stretch of field), picking up speed. Ludmila gave it more throttle, eased the stick back. The ugly little biplane clawed its way into the air.
Even in flight, the U-2 did not go from duckling to swan. Yet, as a mosquito will bite and escape where a horsefly gets noticed and swatted, Kukuruzniks came back from missions more often than any other Soviet planes.
Not much was left of Kaluga. “Ludmila flew over the outskirts of the industrial town. The Germans had wrecked part of when they took it in their drive on Moscow in fall 1941, and the Russians had wrecked more when they took it back later the same year. Whatever they’d left standing, the Lizards had knocked down over the last couple of weeks.
The front lay north of Kaluga these days. The Lizards had cleared a few of the north-south streets through the town so they could move supplies forward. Lorries, some of their manufacture, others captured from the Nazis or the Soviets (some of those Russian-made, others American) rolled along, as if no enemies were to be found for a thousand kilometers.
I may not be much of an enemy, but I’m the best the Soviet Union has here, Ludmila thought. She worked her flaps and rudder, heeled the U-2 over into an attack run on the lorry column she’d spotted.
No one in the column spotted her until she was close enough to open fire. “The mosquito stings!” she hollered, and whooped with glee as Lizards bailed out of the lorries and dove for cover.
Some of them didn’t bail out-some shot back. Bullets snarled past the U-2. Ludmila kept boring in. She pulled the bomb-release handle. The aircraft suddenly got lighter and more maneuverable as weight and drag fell away.
She gunned it for every ruble it was worth, although, with the Kukuruznik, such things were better measured in kopecks. The biplane shook slightly as the bombs exploded behind it. Ludmila looked back over her shoulder. Some of the lorries were burning merrily. Between them and the little bomb craters she’d made, the Lizards wouldn’t be moving much forward on that route for a while.
Pity the U-2 could carry only light bombs. “I don’t just want to block off one road for a while,” Ludmila said, as if a witch might hear and grant her wish. “I want to keep the Lizards from using the whole city.”
What she wanted and what she could do, sadly, were not one and the same. She flew over Kaluga at rooftop height-not that many of the gutted houses and factories still had roofs-shooting at whatever targets she saw. None was as good as that first line of lorries.
The Lizards shot back. After a while, they started shooting the instant she came into range, sometimes before she opened up herself, Time to go, she thought. The Lizards used many more radios than the Red Army did; they must have spread the word that she was buzzing around.
She got out of Kaluga as fast as she could, ducking down between ruined buildings to make herself as nearly unhittable as she could. It must have worked; she escaped with no more damage than a few bullet holes through the fabric covering of the U-2’s wings and fuselage.
She flew off toward the west; the Lizards had to know the air base lay in that direction, and flying into the afternoon sun made her a harder target for gunners in Kaluga. But she zigzagged around a half-burned grove of plum trees and then headed east and north toward the front. With not much standing between the Lizards and Moscow, she had to do all she could, however little that was, to stem the tide of their advance.
Wreckage littered the ground north of Kaluga, the all-too-familiar signs of a Soviet army in disintegration: shattered tanks and armored cars, trench lines reduced to craters by artillery, unburied corpses in khaki. Even zooming by at full throttle, she gagged at the stink of death and decay that filled her nostrils.
Far less Lizard wreckage was strewn about. The Lizards made a point of salvaging their damaged equipment, which accounted for some of the disparity. But most of it sprang from their losing a lot less than their opponents had. That had been a constant of the war since its earliest days.