Page 73 of Striking the Balance (Worldwar 4)

After dark, the partisans took the netting away from one side of the enclosure concealing the light German plane. They pushed theStorch out into the open. Ludmila knew she didn’t have much room in which to take off. The Fieseler wasn’t supposed to need much. She hoped all the things she’d heard about it were true.

She climbed up into the cockpit. When her finger stabbed the starter button, the Argus engine came to life at once. The prop spun, blurred, and seemed to disappear. The guerrillas scattered. Ludmila released the brake, gave theStorch full throttle, and bounced toward two men holding candles who showed her where the trees started. They grew closer alarmingly fast, but when she pulled back on the stick, theStorch hopped into the air as readily as one of its feathered namesakes.

Her first reaction was relief at flying again at last. Then she realized that, compared to what she was used to, she had a hot plane on her hands now. That Argus engine generated more than twice the horsepower of a U-2’s Shvetsov radial, and theStorch didn’t weigh anywhere near twice as much as aKukuruznik. She felt like a fighter pilot.

“Don’t be stupid,” she muttered to herself, good advice for a pilot under any circumstances. In the Fieseler’s enclosed cabin, she could hear herself talk, which had been all but impossible while she was flyingKukuruzniks. She wasn’t used to being airborne without having the slipstream blast her in the face, either.

She stayed as low to the ground as she dared; human-built aircraft that got up much above a hundred meters had a way of reaching zero altitude much more rapidly than their pilots had intended. Flying behind the lines, that worked well. Flying over them, as she discovered now, was another matter. Several Lizards opened up on theStorch with automatic weapons. The noise bullets made hitting aluminum was different from that which came when they penetrated fabric. But when theStorch didn’t tumble out of the sky, she took fresh hope that its designers had known what they were doing.

Then she passed the Lizards’ line and over into German-held Poland. A couple of Nazis took potshots at her, too. She felt like hauling out her pistol and shooting back.

Instead, she peered through the night for a square of four red lanterns. Sweat that had nothing to do with a warm spring night sprang out on her face. She was so low she might easily miss them. If she couldn’t spot them, she’d have to set down anywhere and then no guessing how long the Germans would take to move the ammunition from their storage point to her aircraft, or whether the Lizards would notice theStorch and smash it on the ground before the ammo got to it.

Now that she was flying over human-held terrain, she let herself gain a few more meters’ worth of altitude. There! Off to the left, not far. Her navigation hadn’t been so bad after all. She swung theStorch through a gentle bank and buzzed toward the marked strip.

As she got close to it, she realized it seemed about the size of a postage stamp. Would she really be able to set theStorch down in such a tiny space? She’d have to try, that was certain.

She eased off on the throttle and lowered the aircraft’s huge flaps. The extra resistance they gave her cut into her airspeed astonishingly fast. Maybe she could get theStorch down in one piece after all. She leaned over and looked down through the cockpit glasshouse, almost feeling for the ground.

The touchdown was amazingly gentle. TheStorch’s landing gear had heavy springs to take up the shock of a hard descent. When the descent wasn’t hard, you hardly knew you were on the ground. Ludmila killed the engine and tromped hard on the brake. Almost before she knew it, she was stopped-and she still had fifteen or twenty meters of landing room to spare.

“Good. That was good,” one of the men holding a lantern called to her as he approached the Fieseler. The light he carried showed his toothy grin. “Where did a pack of ragtag partisans come up with such a sharp pilot?”

At the same time as he was speaking, another man-an officer by his tone-called to more men hidden in the darkness: “Come on, you lugs, get those crates over here. You think they’re going to move by themselves?” He sounded urgent and amused at the same time, a good combination for getting the best from the soldiers under his command.

“You Germans always think you’re the only ones who know anything about anything,” Ludmila told theWehrmacht man with the lantern.

His mouth fell open. She’d heard that meant something among the Lizards, but for the life of her couldn’t remember what. She thought it was pretty funny, though. The German soldier turned around and exclaimed, “Hey, Colonel, would you believe it? They’ve got a girl flying this plane.”

“I’ve run into a woman pilot before,” the officer answered. “She was a very fine one, as a matter of fact.”

Ludmila sat in the unfamiliar seat of theStorch. Her whole body seemed to have been dipped in crushed ice-or was it fire? She couldn’t tell. She stared at the instrument panel-all the gauges hard against the zero pegs now-without seeing it. She didn’t realize she’d dropped back into Russian till the words were out of her mouth: “Heinrich… is that you?”

“Mein Gott,”the officer said quietly, out there in the cricket-chirping darkness where she could not see him. She thought that was his voice, but she hadn’t seen him for a year and a half, and never for long at any one stretch. After a moment, he tried again: “Ludmila?”

“What the hell is going on?” asked the soldier with the lantern.

Ludmila got out of the FieselerStorch. She needed to do that anyhow, to make it easier for the Germans to get the chests of ammunition into the aircraft. But even as her feet thumped down onto the ground, she felt she was flying far higher than any plane could safely go.

Jager came up to her. “You’re still alive,” he said, almost severely.

The landing lamp didn’t give enough light. She couldn’t see how he looked, not really. But now that she was looking at him, memory filled in the details the light couldn’t: the way his eyes would have little lines crinkling at the corners, the way one end of his mouth would quirk up when he was amused or just thinking hard, the gray hair at his temples.

She took a step toward him, at the same time as he was taking a step toward her. That left them close enough to step into each other’s arms. “What thehell is going on?” the soldier with the lantern repeated. Ludmila ignored him. Jager, his mouth insis

tent on hers, gave no sign he even heard.

From out of the night, a big, deep German voice boomed, “Well, this is sweet, isn’t it?”

Ludmila ignored that interruption, too. Jager didn’t. He ended the kiss sooner than he should have and turned toward the man who was coming up-in the night, no more than a large, looming shadow. In tones of military formality, he said,“Herr Standartenfuhrer, I introduce to you Lieutenant-”

“Senior Lieutenant,” Ludmila broke in.

“-Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova of the Red Air Force. Ludmila”-the formality broke down there-“this isStandartenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny of theWaffen SS, my-”

“Accomplice.” Now Skorzeny interrupted. “You two are old friends, I see.” He laughed uproariously at his own understatement. “Jager, you sneaky devil, you keep all sorts of interesting things under your hat, don’t you?”

“It’s an irregular sort of war,” Jager answered, a little stiffly. Being “old friends” with a Soviet flier was likely to be as destructive to aWehrmacht man’s career-and maybe to more than that-as having that sort of relationship with a German had been dangerous for Ludmila. But he didn’t try to deny anything, saying, “You’ve worked with the Russians, too, Skorzeny.”

“Not so-intimately.” The SS man laughed again. “But screw that, too.” He chucked Jager under the chin, as if he were an indulgent uncle. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.” Whistling a tune that sounded as if it was probably salacious, he strolled back into the night.

“You-work with him?” Ludmila asked.

“It’s been known to happen,” Jager admitted, his voice dry.

“How?” she said.

The question, Ludmila realized, was far too broad, but Jager understood what she meant by it. “Carefully,” he answered, which made better sense than any reply she’d expected.

Mordechai Anielewicz had long since resigned himself to wearing bits and pieces of German uniforms. There were endless stocks of them in Poland, and they were tough and reasonably practical, even if not so well suited to winter cold as the ones the Russians made.

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