Tilting the Balance

When she said that aloud, Sholudenko waved his arms to encompass the entire scene around them. Then he pointed at the deep ruts, already filling with water, the treads the Lizard tanks had carved in the road. “First worry if peace will ever return,” he said. “After that you can concern yourself with trifles.”

“You’re right,” she said. “From where we stand, this war is liable to go on forever.”

“History is always a struggle-such is the nature of the dialectic,” the NKVD man said: standard Marxist doctrine. All at once, though, he turned human again: “I wouldn’t mind if the struggle were a little less overt.”

Ludmila pointed ahead. “There’s a village. With luck, we’ll be able to lay up for a while. With a lot of luck, we’ll even find some food.”

As they drew closer, Ludmila saw the village looked deserted. Some of the cottages had been burned; others showed bare spots in their thatches, as if they were balding old men. A dog’s skeleton, begi

That was the last thing Ludmila noticed before a shot rang out and kicked up mud a couple of meters in front of her. Her reflexes were good-she was down on her belly and yanking her own pistol out of the holster before she had time for conscious thought.

Another shot-she still didn’t see the flash. Her head swiveled as if on a pivot Where was cover? Where was Sholudenko? He’d hit the dirt as fast as she had. She rolled through muck toward a wooden fence. It wasn’t much in the way of shelter, but it was a lot better than nothing.

“Who’s shooting at us? And why?” she called to Sholudenko.

“The devil’s uncle may know, but I don’t,” the NKVD man answered. He crouched behind a well, whose stones warded him better than the fence shielded Ludmila. He raised his voice: “Hold fire! We’re friends!”

“Liar!” The shout was punctuated by a burst of submachine-gun fire from another cottage. Bullets sparked off the stone facing of the well. Whoever was in there yelled, “You can’t fool us. You’re from Toloko

“I don’t have the slightest idea who Toloko

Ludmila spied the flame the weapon spat. She was seventy or eighty meters away, very long range for a pistol, but she squeezed off a couple of shots anyway, to take the heat off Sholudenko. Then, quick as she could, she rolled away. The relentless submachine gun chewed up the place where she’d been.

The NKVD man fired, too, and was rewarded by a scream and sudden silence from the submachine gun. Don’t get up, Ludmila willed at him, suspecting a trap. He didn’t. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes the gu

By then, Ludmila had found a boulder behind which to shelter. From that more secure position, she called, “Who is this Toloko

She got no coherent answer out of the anti-Toloko

She wondered how long the stalemate could go on. The answer she came up with was glum: indefinitely. There wasn’t enough cover for either side to have much hope of moving to outflank the other. She and Sholudenko couldn’t very well retreat, either. That left sitting tight, shooting every so often, and hoping you got lucky.

Then the equation suddenly grew another variable. Somebody showed himself for a moment: just long enough to chuck a grenade through the window from which the fellow with the submachine gun had been firing. A moment after it went off, he jumped in the window himself. Ludmila heard a rifle shot, then silence.

The grenade chucker came out by way of the window, too, and vanished from her sight. “Whose side is he on?” she called to Sholudenko.

“I keep telling you, ask the devil’s uncle,” he answered. “Maybe Toloko

The anti-Toloko

“Now what?” Ludmila asked.

“I think we wait some more,” Sholudenko answered. “After they got cute when I fired at them, I don’t fancy taking any more chances, thank you very much.”

The highly charged silence persisted. At last, from out of the village, came a cautious call: “Ludmila, bist du da?”

She shook her head. “Someone here knows you?” Sholudenko asked quietly. “Someone German here knows you?” That was not a good thing to admit to an NKVD man, but she did not see she had much choice.

“Georg, is that you?” she asked, also in German. If Sholudenko spoke it, well and good. If he didn’t, she’d already become an object of suspicion in his eyes, and so had little more to lose.

“Ja,” he answered, still not showing himself. “Tell me the name of the general who commands our base, so I can be sure it is truly you.”

“Tovarishch Feofan Karpov is a colonel, as you know perfectly well,” she said. “He is also certain to be furious with you for leaving the base without his leave, as I guess you did-you’re the best mechanic he has.”

“I begin to see,” Sholudenko said-so he did understand German, then. “Is he your, ah, special friend?”

“No,” Ludmila answered angrily. “But he wishes he were, which sometimes makes him a nuisance.” Then, as if she were reading the NKVD man’s mind, she added hastily, “Don’t harm him for that. He is an excellent mechanic, and has given the Red Air Force good service even if he is a fascist.”

“This I will hear,” Sholudenko said. “Had you been sentimental-” He let the sentence hang, but Ludmila had no trouble completing it for herself.

Through the front window of the hut where Schultz had disposed of the second anti-Toloko

Schultz certainly looked like a veteran. He wore his usual mixture of Russian and German gear, though the Nazi helmet on his head gave his nonuniform uniform a Germanic cast Stuffed into his belt, along with a couple of potato-masher grenades, was a pistol He held a Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun, and had slung his rifle over his back.

The panzer gu

Sholudenko answered for himself, giving his name and patronymic but not a

Shultz shrugged. “Fuck him. It s not my army or even my air force, If you know what I mean. And when I get back with her”-he jerked a thumb at Ludmila-“old man Karpov’ll be glad enough to see both of us that he won’t bellyache all that much. You should have heard him-“My best pilot gone. Whatever shall I do?’ ” He raised his voice to a falsetto nothing like the colonel’s but comically effective all the same.