No sooner had the Lancaster’s three-bladed props spun to a stop than men in greatcoats and thick padded jackets dashed out of the trees to start draping it with camouflage netting. Groundcrews had done that back in England, but never with such elan. The outside world disappeared in a hurry; Bagnall could only hope the bomber disappeared from outside view as quickly.
“Did you see?” Embry asked quietly as he disconnected his safety belt.
“See what?” Bagnall asked, also freeing himself.
“Those weren’t all Russians out there covering us up. Some of them were Germans.”
“Bloody hell,” Bagnall muttered. “Are we supposed to give them the airborne radar, too? That wasn’t in our orders.”
Alf Whyte stuck his head out from the little black-curtained cubicle where he labored with map and ruler and compasses and protractor. “Before the Lizards came, Pskov was headquarters for Army Group North. The Lizards ran Jerry out, but then they left themselves when winter started. It’s Russian enough now for us to land here, obviously, but I expect there will be some leftover Nazis as well.”
“Isn’t that wonderful?” By Embry’s tone, it was anything but.
The cold hit like a blow in the face when the aircrew left the Lanc. They were an abbreviated lot, pilot, flight engineer (Bagnall doubled as radioman), navigator, and radarman. No bomb-aimer on this run, no bombardiers, and no gunners in the turrets. If a Lizard jet attacked, machine guns weren’t going to be able to reply to its cannon and rockets.
“Zdrast’ye,” Ken Embry said, thereby exhausting his Russian. “Does anyone here speak English?”
“I do,” two men said, one with a Russian accent, the other in Germanic tones. They looked suspiciously at each other. Some months of joint battle against a common foe had not eased the memory of what they’d been doing to each other before the Lizards came.
Bagnall had done some German before he left college to join the RAF. That was only three years ago, but already most of it had vanished from his brain. Like most undergraduates taking German, he’d come upon Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language.” That he remembered, especially the bit about sooner declining two beers than one German adjective. And Russian was worse-even the alphabet looked funny.
To Bagnall’s surprise, Jerome Jones started speaking Russian-halting Russian, but evidently good enough to be understood. After a brief exchange, he turned back to the air crew and said, “He-Sergei Leonidovich Morozkin there, the chap who knows a bit of English-says we’re to accompany him to the Krom, the local strongpoint, I gather.”
“By all means let us accompany him, then,” Embry said. “I didn’t know you had any Russian, Jones. The chaps who put this mission together had a better notion of what they were about than I credited them for.”
“I doubt that, sir,” Jones said, unwilling to give RAF higher-ups any credit for sense. But he had reason on his side: “When I was at Cambridge, I was interested for a while in Byzantine history and art, and that led me to the Russians. I hadn’t the time to do them properly, but I did teach myself a bit of the language. That wouldn’t be in any of my papers, though, so no one would have known of it.”
“Good thing it’s so, all the same,” Bagnall said, wondering if Jones was a Bolshevik himself. Even if he was, it didn’t matter now. “My German is villainous, but I was about to trot it out when you spoke up. I wasn’t what you’d call keen on trying to speak with our Soviet friends and allies in the language of a mutual foe.”
The German who spoke English said, “Against the Eidechsen-I am sorry, I do not know your word; the Russians call them Yashcheritsi-against the invaders from the sky, no men are foes to one another.”
“Against the Lizards, you mean,” Bagnall and Embry said together.
“Lizards.” Both the German and Morozkin, the anglophone Russian, echoed the word to fix it in their minds; it was one that would be used a good deal in days to come. The German went on, “I am Hauptmann-Captain auf Englisch, ja? — Martin Borcke.”
As soon as the men of the aircrew had introduced themselves in turn, Morozkin said, “Come to Krom now. Get away from airplane.”
“But the radar-” Jones said plaintively.
“We do. Is in box, da?”
“Well, yes, but-”
“Come,” Morozkin said again. At the far end of the airstrip-a long, hard slog through cold and snow-three-horse sleighs waited to take the Englishmen into Pskov. Their bells jangled merrily as they set off, as If in a happy winter song. Bagnall would have found the journey more enjoyable had his Russian driver not had a rifle slung across his back and half a dozen German potato-masher grenades stuffed into his belt.
Pskov had been built in rings where two rivers came together. The sleigh slid past churches and fine houses in the center of town, many bearing the scars of fighting when the Germans had taken it from the Soviets and when the Lizards struck north.
Closer to the joining of the two streams were a marketplace and another church. In the market, old women with scarves around their heads sold beets, turnips, cabbages. Steam rose from kettles of borscht. People queued up to get what they needed, not with the good spirits Englishmen displayed on similar occasions but glumly, resignedly, as if they could expect nothing better from fate.
Guards prowled the marketplace to make sure no one even thought of turning disorderly. Some were Germans with rifles and coal-scuttle helmets, many still wearing field-gray great-coats. Others were Russians, carrying everything from shotguns to military rifles to submachine guns, and dressed in a motley mixture of civilian clothes and khaki Soviet uniform. Everyone, though-Germans, Russians, even the old women behind their baskets of vegetables-wore the same kind of thick felt boot.
The sleigh driver had on a pair, too. Bagnall tapped the fellow on the shoulder, pointed at the footgear. “What do you call those?” He got back only a smile and a shrug, and regretfully tried German: “Was sind sie?”
Comprehension lit the driver’s face. “Valenki.” He rattled off a couple of sentences in Russian before he figured out Bagnall couldn’t follow. His German was even slower and more halting than the flight engineer’s, which gave Bagnall a chance to understand it: “Gut-gegen-Kalt.”
“Good against cold. Thanks. Uh, danke. Ich verstehe.” They nodded to each other, pleased at the rudimentary communication. The valenki looked as if they’d be good against cold; they were thick and supple, like a blanket for the feet.
The sleigh went past a square with a monument to Lenin and then, diagonally across from it, another onion-domed church. Bagnall wondered if the driver was conscious of the ironic juxtaposition. If he was, he didn’t let on. Letting on that you noticed irony probably wasn’t any safer in the Soviet Union than in Hitler’s Germany.
Bagnall shook his head. The Russians had become allies because they were Hitler’s enemies. Now the Russians and Germans were both allies because they’d stayed in the ring against the Lizards. They still weren’t comfortable company to keep.
The horses began to strain as they went uphill toward the towers that marked old Pskov. As the beasts labored and the sleigh slowed, Bagnall grasped why the fortress that was the town’s beginning had been placed as it was: the fortress ahead, which he presumed to be the Krom, stood on a bluff protected by the rivers. The driver took him past the tumbledown stone wall that warded the landward side of the fortress. Some of the tumbling down looked recent; Bagnall wondered whether Germans or Lizards were to blame.
The sleigh stopped. Bagnall climbed out. The driver pointed him toward one of the towers; its witches’-hat roof had had a bite taken out of it. A German sentry stood to one side of the doorway, a Russian to the other. They threw the doors wide for Bagnall.