Page 79 of Striking the Balance (Worldwar 4)

“Nye za chto-you’re welcome,” came the answer: he’d guessed right the second time. That wasn’t what made his jaw drop foolishly, though. He’d expected whatever answer he got to be baritone, not creamy contralto.

Jerome Jones yelped like a puppy with its tail caught in a door. “Tatiana!” he exclaimed, and went on in Russian, “What are you doing here?”

“Never mind that now,” the sniper answered. “First we go around that house full of anti-Soviet reactionaries, since you Englishmen were foolish enough to give them quarter.”

“How do you know they aren’t anti-fascist patriots?” Embry asked in a mixture of German and Russian.

Tatiana Pirogova let out an annoyed snort. “They are Estonians, so they must be anti-Soviet.” She spoke as if stating a law of nature. Bagnall didn’t feel inclined to quarrel with her, not after what she’d just done for them.

She didn’t say anything else as she led the RAF men on a long loop around the farmhouse. It went slowly; none of them dared stand while they might still be in rifle range. The house and barn, though, remained as silent as if uninhabited. Bagnall wished they had been.

At last, cat-wary, Tatiana got to her feet. The Englishmen followed her lead, grunting with relief. “How did you come upon us at just the right moment?” Bagnall asked her, taking her rising as giving him leave to speak.

She shrugged. “I left two days after you. You were not traveling very fast. And so-there I was. In half an hour’s time-less, maybe-I would have hailed you if the shooting had not started.”

“What about-Georg Schultz?” Jerome Jones asked-hesitantly, as if half fearing her reply.

She shrugged again, with magnificent indifference. “Wounded-maybe dead. I hope dead, but I am not sure. He is strong.” She spoke with grudging respect. “But he thought he could do with me as he pleased. He was wrong.” She patted the barrel of her telescopically sighted rifle to show how wrong he was.

“What will you do now?” Bagnall asked her.

“Get you safe to the sea,” she answered. “After that? Who knows? Go back and kill more Germans around Pskov, I suppose.”

“Thank you for coming this far to look after us,” Bagnall said. Odd to think of Tatiana Pirogova, sniper extraordinaire (had he been inclined to doubt that, which he wasn’t, the affair at the farmhouse would have proved her talents along those lines), with a mother-hen complex, but she seemed to have one. Now he hesitated before continuing, “If we can lay hold of a boat, you’re welcome-more than welcome-to come to England with us.”

He wondered if she’d get angry; he often wondered that when he dealt with her. Instead, she looked sad and-most unlike the Tatiana he thought he knew-confused. At last she said, “You go back to yourrodina, your motherland. So that is right for you. But this”-she stamped a booted foot down on the sickly green grass-“this is myrodina. I will stay and fight for it.”

The Estonians she’d shot had thought this particular stretch of ground was part of their motherland, not hers. The Germans in Kohtla-Jarve undoubtedly thought of it as an extension of theirVaterland. All the same, he took her point.

He nodded off toward the west, toward the smoke that never stopped rising from Kohtla-Jarve. “What do they make there, that they have to keep it hidden from the Lizards no matter what?” he asked.

“They squeeze oil out of rocks in some way,” Tatiana answered. “We have been doing that for years, we and then the reactionary Estonian separatists. I suppose the fascists found the plants in working order, or they may have repaired them.”

Bagnall nodded. That made sense. Petroleum products were doubly precious these days. Any place the Germans could get their hands on such, they would.

“Come,” Tatiana said, dismissing the Germans as a distraction. She set off with a long, swinging stride that was a distraction in itself and gave some justification to her claim the RAF men traveled slowly.

They reached the Baltic a couple of hours later. It looked unimpressive: gray water rolling up and back over mud. Even so, Jerome Jones, imitating Xenophon’s men, called out,“Thalassa! Thalassa!” Bagnall and Embry both smiled, recognizing the allusion. Tatiana shrugged it off. Maybe she thought it was English. To her, that tongue was as alien as Greek.

Perhaps half a mile to the west, a little village squatted by the sea. Bagnall felt like cheering when he saw a couple of fishing boats pulled up onto the beach. Another, despite the early hour, was already out on the Baltic.

Dogs barked as the RAF men and Tatiana came into the village. Fishermen and their wives stepped out of doors to stare at them. Their expressions ranged from blank to hostile. In German, Bagnall said, “We are three English fliers. We have been trapped in Russia for more than a year. We want to go home. Can any of you sail us to Finland? We do not have much, but we will give you what we can.”

“Englishmen?” one of the fishermen said, with the same strange accent the Estonian fighters had had. Hostility melted. “I will take you.” A moment later, someone else demanded the privilege.

“Didn’t expect to be quarreled over,” Embry murmured as the villagers hashed it out. The fellow who’d spoken first won the argument. He ducked back into his home, reemerging with boots and knitted wool cap, then escorted them to his boat.

Tatiana followed. As the RAP men were about to help drag the boat into the water, she kissed each of them in turn. The villagers muttered among themselves in incomprehensible Estonian. A couple of men guffawed. That was understandable. So were the loud sniffs from a couple of women.

“You’re certain you won’t come with us?” Bagnall said. Tatiana shook her head yet again. She turned around and tramped south without looking back. She knew what she intended to do, and had to know the likely consequences of it.

“Come,” the fisherman said. The RAF men scrambled aboard with him. The rest of the villagers finished pushing the boat into the sea. He opened the fire door to the steam engine and started throwing in wood and peat and what looked like chunks of dried horse manure. Shaking his head, he went on, “Ought to burn coal. Can’t get coal. Burn whatever I get.”

“We know a few verses to that song,” Bagnall said. The fisherman chuckled. The boat had probably been slow burning its proper fuel. It was slower now, and the smoke that poured from its stack even less pleasant than the smudges from Kohtla-Jarve. But the engine ran. The boat sailed. Barring the Lizards’ strafing them from the air, Finland was less than a day away.

“Oh, Jager, dear,” Otto Skorzeny said in scratchy falsetto. Heinrich Jager looked up in surprise; he hadn’t heard Skorzeny come up. The SS man laughed

at him. “Stop mooning over that Russian popsy of yours and pay attention. I need something from you.”

“She isn’t a popsy,” Jager said. Skorzeny laughed louder. The panzer colonel went on, “If she were a popsy, I don’t suppose I’d be mooning over her.”

The half admission got through to Skorzeny, who nodded. “All right, something to that. But even if she’s the Madonna, stop mooning over her. You know our friends back home have sent us a present, right?”

“Hard not to know it,” Jager agreed. “More of you damned SS men around than you can shake a stick at, every stinking one of them with a Schmeisser and a look in his eye that says he’d just as soon shoot you as give you the time of day. I’ll bet I even know what kind of present it is, too.” He didn’t say what kind of present he thought it was, not because he believed he might be wrong but from automatic concern for security.

“I’ll bet you do,” Skorzeny said. “Why shouldn’t you? You’ve known about this stuff as long as I have, ever since those days outside Kiev.” He said no more after that, but it was plenty. They’d stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in the Ukraine.

“What are you going to do with-it?” Jager asked cautiously.

“Are you thick in the head?” Skorzeny demanded. “I’m going to blow the kikes in Lodz to hell and gone, is what I’m going to do, and their chums the Lizards, and all the poor damned Poles in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He laughed again. “There’s the story of Poland in a sentence,nicht wahr? The poor damned Poles, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I presume you have authorization for this?” Jager said, not presuming any such thing. If anybody could lay hands on an atomic bomb for his own purposes, Otto Skorzeny was the man.

But not this time. Skorzeny’s big head went up and down. “You bet your arse I do: from theReichsfuhrer-SS and straight from the Fuhrer himself. Both of ’em in my attache case. You want to gape at fancy autographs?”

---