In the Balance полностью

“Very efficient,” Max said dryly. Jager took it for a compliment until he remembered it was the word the Jew had used to describe the assembly-line murder at-what was the name of the place? — at Babi Yar, that was it.

Anger surged in the panzer major. The trouble was, he had trouble deciding whether to turn it on his own people for dishonoring the uniforms they wore or the Jew for telling him about it and making him notice it. He glanced over at Max. As usual, Max was watching him. He had no trouble finding a focus for his fury.

Jager twisted his head, looked behind him. The driving rain had already obscured the woods. He could see one of the decoy pairs, but only one. He wouldn’t have wanted to track anyone in weather like this, and wished just as much trouble on the Lizards. They wouldn’t pursue in panzers, anyhow; from what he’d seen, their armor had at least as much trouble coping with Russian mud as the Wehrmacht did.

He must have been thinking aloud. Max grinned an unsympathetic grin and said, “You poor bogged-down bastards.”

“Fuck you, too, Max.” In the wrong tone of voice, that would have started the fight Skorzeny had not-quite-joked about. As it was, the Jewish partisan’s expression changed shape as if he, like Jager, had to change some of his thinking.

Then both men’s faces congealed to fear. The Lizards had more helicopters in the air, and this time no flak cannon would stop them. Rifle shots rang out from back in the woods, but using a rifle against one of these machines was as magnificently futile as the Polish lancers’ charges against German panzers back when the war-the human war-was new.

But these rifle bullets did have some effect. The whistling roar of the copter rotors grew no louder. The deadly machines hovered over the trees. Their guns snarled. When they paused, more rifle fire announced that they hadn’t finished off all the raiders. The yarnmering resumed.

The sound from the helicopters changed. Jager looked back, but could see nothing through the curtains of rain. He tried to be optimistic anyhow: “Maybe they’re settling down so they can comb through the woods-if they are, they’ll be looking in the wrong place.”

Max was less sanguine: “Don’t count on them to be so fucking stupid.”

“They aren’t what you’d call good soldiers, not in the tactical sense,” Jager answered seriously. “They’re brave enough, and of course they have all that wonderful equipment, but ask them to do anything they haven’t planned out in advance and they start floundering around.” They’re even worse than Russians that way, he thought, but he kept quiet about that.

The strafing from the helicopters hadn’t slaughtered all the raiders. Rifles barked again; a Soviet submachine gun added its note to the din. Then, harsher and flatter, Lizard automatic small arms answered.

“They have landed troops!” Jager exclaimed. “The longer they waste time back there, the better the chance the mission has of succeeding.”

“And the likelier they’ll kill off my friends,” Max said. “Yours too, I suppose. Does a fucking Nazi have friends? After a tough day shooting Jews in the back of the neck, do you go out and drink some beer with your Kameraden?”

“I’m a soldier, not a butcher,” Jager said. He wondered whether Georg Schultz had got one of the dummy chests. If so, he was tramping through the mud, too. If not… He also wondered about Otto Skorzeny. The SS captain seemed to have a gift for creating impossible situations and then escaping from them. He’d need all that gift now. But thinking of the SS made Jager think of Babi Yar. That would have been their doing; Wehrmacht men couldn’t have stomached it. He added, “You Russians have butchers, too.”

“So?” Max said. “Does that make you right?” Jager found no good answer. The Jewish partisan went on, “I wish they’d sent me to the gulag in Siberia years before you fucking Germans ever got to Kiev. Then I wouldn’t have had to see what I saw.”

Further argument cut off abruptly when Jager fell headlong into the muck. Max helped him haul himself to his feet. They pushed on. Jager felt as if he were a hundred years old. A kilometer through this clinging goo was worse than a day’s march on hard, dry ground. He wistfully wondered whether the Soviet Union contained so much as a square centimeter of hard, dry ground at the moment.

He also wondered for what the soft, wet ground over which he was fleeing had been used. In Germany, land had a clearly defined purpose: meadow, crops, forest, park, town. This stretch met no such criteria. It was just land-raw terrain. Of that the Soviet Union had unending inefficient abundance.

Jager abruptly cut off his disparaging thoughts about Soviet inefficiency. His head went up like a hunted animal’s. The tiny, atrophied muscles in his ears tried to make them prick like a cat’s. Lizard helicopters were in the air again. “We have to move faster,” he said to Max.