The pilot asked, “And why has General Chill been so extraordinarily gracious?”

“His justification is that the Nazis, with their heavier weapons, would be better used as a reserve to meet any possible Lizard breakthroughs.”

“Oh,” Embry said in a slightly different tone.

“Just what I thought,” Bagnall answered. The rationale made just enough military sense to force one to wonder whether Chill’s plan shouldn’t be carried out as proposed. The flight engineer added, “Germans are bloody good at coming up with plausible reasons for things that are to their advantage.”

“To their short-term advantage,” Embry amended. “Setting the Russians up to be massacred will not endear Chill to them.”

Bagnall snorted. “Somehow I doubt that will cause him to lose any great quantity of sleep. He wants to keep his own forces intact first.”

“He also wants to hold Pskov,” Embry said. “He won’t do that without the Russians’ help-nor will they, without his. A lovely muddle, wouldn’t you say?”

“If you want my opinion, it would be even lovelier if viewed from a distance-say from a London pub-than when we’re caught in the middle of it.”

“Something to that,” Embry sighed. “Real springtime leaves… flowers… birds… a pint pot of best bitter… perhaps even Scotch.”

The pain of longing pierced Bagnall like a stiletto. He feared he’d never see England or its loveliness again. As for Scotch… well, the spirit the Russians brewed from potatoes would warm a man, or send him to sleep if he drank enough of it, but it didn’t taste like anything. He’d also heard that drinking neutral spirits kept you from feeling the effects the next morning. He shook his head. He’d shot that theory right behind the ear more often than he cared to remember.

Embry said, “Speaking of getting stuck in the middle, is there more talk of turning us into infantrymen again?”

Bagnall didn’t blame him for sounding anxious; their one foray against the Lizard outpost south of Pskov had been plenty to put the flight engineer off the life of a foot soldier forever. The choice, unfortunately, did not rest with him. He said, “They didn’t say anything about that when I was in the Krom. But then, they might not have wanted to, either.”

“For fear we’d bugger off, you mean?” Embry said. Bagnall nodded. The pilot went on, “Nothing I’d like better. Only-where would we go?”

It was a good question. The short answer, unfortunately for both of them, was nowhere, not with the woods full of partisan bands, German patrols, and just plain bandits. Next to some of them, the prospect of facing the Lizards seemed less disastrous. The Lizards wouldn’t do anything worse than killing you. Bagnall said, “You don’t really believe those stories about the cannibals in the forest, do you?”

“Let’s just say it’s something I’d sooner not find out by experiment.”

“Too right there.”

Before Bagnall could go on, someone knocked at the door. The plaintive voice that came through the thick boards was London-accented: “Can you let me in? I’m fair frozen.”

“Radarman Jones!” Bagnall threw the door wide. Jerome Jones came in. Bagnall quickly shut the door after him, and waved him over to the samovar. “Drink some of that. It’s fairly good.”

“Where’s the beautiful Tatiana?” Ken Embry asked Jones as he poured himself a glass of herb tea. Embry sounded jealous. Bagnall didn’t blame him. Somehow Jones had managed to connect with a Russian sniper who was even more decorative than she was deadly.

“She’s off trying to kill things, I suppose,” the radarman answered. He sipped the tea, made a face. “Maybe not bad, but it could be better.”

“Being all alone, then, you deigned to honor us with a visit, eh?” Bagnall said.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Jones muttered, then hastily added, “sir.” His position in Pskov was, to put it mildly, irregular. While Bagnall and Embry were both officers and he very much from the other ranks, he had the specialization in which the Russians-and the Nazis-were interested.

Ken Embry said, “It’s all right, Jones. We know they treat you like a field marshal everywhere else in town. Decent of you to remember your military manners around low cannon-fodder types like ourselves.”

The radarman winced. Even Bagnall, used to such sarcastic sallies, had trouble being sure how much was intended as wit and how much fired with intent to wound. A spell as an infantryman in an attack that got crushed was enough to jaundice anyone’s outlook.

Giving the pilot the benefit of the doubt, Bagnall said, “Don’t let him faze you, Jones. Our mission was to get you here, and that we’ve done. What came afterwards, the Lanc getting bombed-well, nichevo.”

“There’s a useful word, eh, sir?” Jones said, anxious to change the subject. “Can’t be helped, nothing to be done about it-that the Russians pack it all into one word says a lot about them, I think.”

“Yes, and not all of it good, either,” Embry said, evidently willing to drop his bitterness. “These people have spent their entire history being stepped on. Tsars, commissars, what have you-it’d be a miracle indeed if that didn’t show in the language.”

“Shall we put Mr. Jones’ knowledge of Russian to more practical use?” Bagnall said. Without waiting for a reply from Embry, he asked the radarman, “What do you hear, going up and down in the city?”

“The name is Jones, sir, as you noted, not Job,” Jones replied with a grin which rapidly slipped. “People are hungry, people are battered. They don’t love the Germans or the Bolsheviks. If they thought the Lizards would feed them and leave them alone otherwise, a lot would just as soon see them as top dogs.”

“If I’d stayed safe at home in England, I’d have trouble imagining that,” Bagnall said. Of course, flying bomber missions first against the Germans and then against the Lizards had been anything but safe, but Jones and Embry both nodded, understanding what he meant. He went on, “After the Jews rose for the Lizards and against the Nazis, I thought they were the blackest traitors in the history of the world-until their story started coming out. If a tenth part of what they say is true, Germany has more blood on her hands than a thousand years of Hitler’s Reich can wash away.”

“And they and we are allies,” Embry said heavily.

“And they and we are allies, yes,” Bagnall agreed. “And so are they and the Russians, and so are we and the Russians, and Stalin, by all that’s said, matches Hitler for butchery any day of the week, even if he’s not so showy about it.”

“It’s a rum old world,” Embry said.

Not far away, somebody fired a rifle in the street. Somebody else fired another one, with a report that sounded different: one weapon was German, the other Soviet. Another handful of shots followed, then silence. Bagnall waited tensely wondering if the shooting would start up again. That would be all anyone needed-war inside Pskov between alleged allies to accompany war outside against foes. But silence held for a couple of minutes.

Then the shooting started again, worse than ever-one of those new German machine guns, the ones with the terrifyingly high cyclic rate that made them sound even more dreadful than they really were, added to the chaos. Several Russian submachine guns gave answer. Through the raucous racket of gunfire came hoarse screams. Bagnall couldn’t tell if they were Russian or German.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Jerome Jones said.

Embry took hold of one end of a chest of drawers and started pushing it toward the front door, saying, “Best we put up something of a barricade, wouldn’t you say?”

Bagnall didn’t say anything, but did put his back into helping the pilot manhandle the heavy wooden chest into place. Then he picked up a chair and, grunting, set it on top of the low chest. Together, he and Embry leaned a table against the window by the doorway.