Georg Schultz sat up again, spilling straw in all directions. “These stinking dirt roads played hell with us, all through Russia. The map would say we were coming up to a highway, and it’d either be dust and dirt like this or mud when it rained. Didn’t seem fair. You damn Russians were so backwards, it ended up helping you.”
The driver didn’t move a muscle; he just kept driving. In spite of that, Ludmila would have bet he knew German. If he was from the NKVD, he’d have more talents than his rough-hewn exterior revealed.
Every so often, they’d pass the dead carcasses of tanks rocketed from the air by the Lizards before they ever reached the front. Some had been there long enough to start rusting. Most had their engine compartments and turret hatches open: the Soviets had salvaged whatever they could from the wreckage.
Even as scrap metal, the T-34s looked formidable. Pointing to one, Ludmila asked with no small pride, “And what did you think of those when you were up against them, Comrade Panzer Gunner?”
“Nasty buggers,” Schultz answered promptly, ignoring the ironic form of address. “Good armor, good gun, good engine, good tracks-all better than anything we had, probably. The gunsight, not so good. Not the two-man turret, either-the commander’s too busy helping the gunner to command the panzer, and that’s his proper job. He should have a cupola, too. And you need more panzers with wireless sets. Not having them hurt your tactics, and they weren’t that great to begin with.”
Now Ludmila hoped the driver was listening. She’d been aiming to twit the German tankman; she hadn’t expected such a serious, thoughtful answer. Being a Nazi didn’t automatically make a man a fool, no matter what propaganda claimed.
The journey in to Moscow took two days. They spent the first night in a stand of trees well off the road. The Lizards still flew by at night, smashing up whatever they could find.
Moscow, when they finally reached it, made Ludmila gasp in dismay. She’d last been there the winter before, after she’d flown Molotov to Germany. The Soviet capital had taken a beating then. Now…
Now it seemed that every building possibly large enough to contain a factory had been pounded flat. A couple of the onion domes of the Kremlin and St. Basil’s had crumpled. Walls everywhere were streaked with soot; the faint odor of wet, stale smoke hung in the air.
But people hadn’t given up.
The driver knew which bridge over the Moscow River was in good enough repair to get them up to the Kremlin, and which parts of the battered heart of Moscow-of the Soviet Union-were still beating. He pulled the
Some of the walls in the corridor were cracked, but the electric lights worked. Off in the distance, a petrol-fired generator chugged away to keep the lightbulbs shining. “Wish
The corridor was not the one down which Ludmila had gone on her earlier meeting with Boris Lidov; she wondered if that part of the Kremlin still stood. The wagon driver opened a door, peered inside, beckoned to her and to Georg Schultz. “He will see you.”
Ludmila’s heart pounded in her chest, as if she were about to fly a combat mission. She knew she had reason to be nervous; the NKVD could kill you as readily, and with as little remorse, as the Germans or the Lizards. And Lidov had made plain what he thought of her after she got back from Germany. She might have gone to a
The NKVD colonel (Ludmila wondered if his promotion sprang from ability or simply survival) looked up from a paper-strewn desk. She started to report to him in proper military form, but Schultz beat her to the punch, saying breezily, “How goes it with you, Boris, you scrawny old prune-faced bastard?”
Staring, Ludmila waited for the sky to fall. It wasn’t that the description didn’t fit; it did, like a glove. But to say what you thought of an NKVD colonel, right to his prune face… Maybe he didn’t follow German.
