Jager thought back to the splendid organization of Sixteenth Panzer when the division plunged into the Soviet Union. Back then, the thought of getting tanks into action by these dribs and drabs would have caused apoplexy in the High Command. That was before the Lizards had started plastering the German rail and road networks. Now any movement toward the front was counted a success.
He squeezed butter and meat paste from their tubes onto a chunk of black bread. As he chewed, he reflected that a lot of things had happened to him that he never would have expected before the Lizards came. He’d fought against the alien invaders side by side with a band of Russian partisans, most of them Jews.
He hadn’t had much use for Jews before then. He still didn’t have a whole lot of use for them, but now he understood why the Jews of Warsaw had risen against the town’s German occupiers to help the Lizards take it. Nothing the aliens did to them could come close to what they’d suffered at the hands of the Reich.
And yet those same Polish Jews had let him cross their territory, and hadn’t even confiscated from him all the explosive metal that had been his booty from the joint German-Soviet raid on the Lizards. True, they’d taken half to send it to the United States, but they’d let him deliver the rest to his own superiors. Even now, German scientists were working to avenge Berlin.
He took another bite. Even that wasn’t the strangest. Had anyone told him on June 22, 1941, that he would-have an affair with? fall in love with? (he still wasn’t sure about that himself}-a Soviet pilot, his most likely reaction would have been to punch the teller in the eye for calling him a fairy. On the day the war with the Soviet Union started, no one in Germany knew the Russians would use female fliers in combat.
He hoped Ludmila was all right. They’d first met in the Ukraine, where she’d plucked him and his gunner (he hoped Georg Schultz was all right, too) off a collective farm and taken them to Moscow so they could explain to the Red Army brass how they’d managed to kill a Lizard panzer. He’d written to her after that-she had some German, he a little Russian-but got no answer.
Then they’d come together at Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had pinned on him the German Cross in gold (a medal so ugly he wore only the ribbon these days) and she’d flown in Molotov for consultation with, the Fuhrer. He smiled slowly. That had been as magical a week as he’d ever known.
But what now? he wondered. Ludmila had flown back to the Soviet Union, where the NKVD would not look kindly upon her for sleeping with a Nazi… any more than the Gestapo was pleased with him for sleeping with a Red. “Screw ’em all,” he muttered, which drew a quizzical glance from Rolf Wittman. Jager did not explain.
A motorcycle came put-putting slowly down the road, its headlight dimmed almost to extinction by a blackout slit cap. With the Lizards’ detectors, even that could be dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving a winding French road in pitch darkness.
The motorcycle driver spotted the panzers off under the trees. He stopped, throttled down, and called, “Anyone know where I can find Colonel Heinrich Jager?”
“Here I am,” Jager said, standing up. “Was ist los?”
“I have here orders for you, Colonel.” The driver pulled them out of his tunic pocket.
Jager unfolded the paper, stooped down and held it in front of the motorcycle headlamp so he could read it. “Scheisse,” he exclaimed. “I’ve been recalled. They just put me back in frontline service, and now I’ve been recalled.”
“Yes, sir,” the driver agreed. “I am ordered to take you back with me.”
“But why?” Jager said. “It makes no sense. Here I am an experienced fighter for Fuhrer and Vaterland against the Lizards. But what good will I do in this Hechingen place? I’ve scarcely even heard of it.”
But he had heard of it, and fairly recently, too. Where? When? He stiffened as memory came. Hechingen was where Hitler had said he was sending the explosive metal. Without another word, Jager walked over to his Panther, got on the radio, and turned command over to the regimental lieutenant-colonel. Then he slung his pack onto his shoulders, went back to the motorcycle, climbed on behind the driver, and headed back toward Germany.
II
Ludmila Gorbunova did not care for Moscow. She was from Kiev, and thought the Soviet capital drab and dull. Her impression of it was not improved by the endless grilling she’d had from the NKVD. She’d never imagined the mere sight of green collar tabs could reduce her to fearful incoherence, but it did.
And, she knew, things could have been worse. The chekists were treating her with kid gloves because she’d flown Comrade Molotov, second in the Soviet Union only to the Great Stalin, and a man who loathed flying, to Germany and brought him home in one piece. Besides, the rodina-the motherland-needed combat pilots. She’d stayed alive through most of a year against the Nazis and several months against the Lizards. That should have given her value above and beyond what she got for ferrying Molotov around.
Whether it did, however, remained to be seen. A lot of very able, seemingly very valuable people had disappeared over the past few years, denounced as wreckers or traitors to the Soviet Union or sometimes just vanished with no explanation at all, as if they had suddenly ceased to exist…
The door to the cramped little room (cramped, yes, but infinitely preferable to a cell in the Lefortovo prison) in which she sat came open. The NKVD man who came in wore three crimson oblongs on his collar tabs. Ludmila bounced to her feet. “Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!” she said, saluting.
He returned the salute, the first time that had happened since the NKVD started in on her. “Comrade Senior Lieutenant,” he acknowledged. “I am Boris Lidov.” She blinked in surprise; none of her questioners had bothered giving his name till now, either. Lidov looked more like a schoolmaster than an NKVD man, not that that meant anything. But he surprised her again, saying, “Would you like some tea?”
“Yes, thank you very much, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,” she answered-quickly, before he changed his mind. The German attack had deranged the Soviet distribution system, that of the Lizards all but destroyed it. These days, tea was rare and precious.
Well, she thought, the NKVD will have it if anyone does. And sure enough, Lidov stuck his head out the door and bawled a request. Within moments, someone fetched him a tray with two gently steaming glasses. He took it, set it on the table in front of Ludmila. “Help yourself,” he, said. “Choose whichever you wish; neither one is drugged, I assure you.”
He didn’t need to assure her; that he did so made her suspicious again. But she took a glass and drank. Her tongue found nothing in it but tea and sugar. She sipped again, savoring the taste and the warmth. “Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. It’s very good,” she said.
Lidov made an indolent gesture, as If to say she didn’t need to thank him for anything so small. Then he said idly, as if making casual conversation, “You know, I met your Major Jager-no, you’ve said he’s Colonel Jager now, correct? — your Colonel Jager, I should say, after you brought him here to Moscow last summer.”
“Ah,” Ludmila said, that being the most noncommittal noise she could come up with. She decided it was not enough.
“Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, as I have said before, he is not my colonel by any means.”