Tilting the Balance

“Not our partisans” German said. Then he fell silent, and Vasiliev had nothing to add, from which Bagnall inferred General Chill had scored a point.

Chill folded his arms across his chest. “Does either of you gentlemen propose to take overall command of the defenses of Pleskau-excuse me, Pskov?”

Aleksandr German and Vasiliev looked at each other. Neither seemed overjoyed at the prospect of doing as Chill had suggested. In their valenki, Bagnall wouldn’t have been overjoyed either. Conducting hit-and-run raids from the forest wasn’t the same as fighting a standup campaign. The partisans knew well how to make nuisances of themselves. They also had to be uneasily aware that partisan warfare hadn’t kept the Germans from Pskov or driven them out of it.

Finally Vasiliev said, “Nyet.” He went on through his interpreter. “You are best suited to lead the defense provided you do it so that you are defending the town and the people and the Soviet fighters in the area as well as your own Nazis.”

“If I defend the area, I defend all of it, or as much as I can with the men and resources I have available,” Chill answered. “This also means that if I give an order to one of your units, I expect it to be obeyed.”

“Certainly,” Vasiliev answered, “so long as the unit’s commander and political commissar judge the order to be in the best interest of the cause as a whole, not just to the advantage of you Germans.”

“That is not good enough,” Chill replied coldly. “They must take the overall well-being, as their governing assumption, and obey whether they see the need or not. One of the reasons for having an overall commander is to have a man in a position where he can see things his subordinates do not.”

“Nyet,” Vasiliev said again. Aleksandr German echoed him.

“Oh, bugger, here we go again,” Bagnall whispered to Jerome Jones. The radarman nodded. Bagnall went on, “We’ve got to do something, before we go through another round of the idiocy that had the Bolshies and Nazis blazing away at each other a few weeks ago. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy getting stuck between them again.”

“Nor I,” Jones whispered back. “If that’s what the ground-pounders call war, thank God for the RAF, is all I have to say.”

“You get no arguments from me,” Bagnall said. “Remember, I’d already found that out. You weren’t along for the raid on the Lizard base south of here.” They thought you were too valuable to risk he thought without much rancor. Ken and poor dead Alf and I, we were expendable, but not you-you know your radars too well.

As if thinking along similar lines, Jones answered, “I tried to come along. The bloody Russians wouldn’t let me.”

“Did you? I didn’t know that.” Bagnall’s opinion of Jones went up a peg. To volunteer to get shot at when you didn’t have to took something special.

As most Englishmen would, Jones brushed that aside. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. We have to worry about now, as you said.” He got up and said loudly, “Tovarishchi!” Even Bagnal knew that one-it meant Comrades! Jones went on, in Russian and then in German, “If we want to hand Pskov to the Lizards on a silver platter, we can go on just as we are now.”

“Yes? And so?” Kurt Chill asked. “What is your solution? Shall we all place ourselves under your command?” His smile was hard and bright and sharp, like a shark’s.

Jones turned pale and sat down in a hurry. “I’ve got a picture of that, I do, bloody generals kowtowing to a radarman. Not flipping likely.”

“Why not?” Bagnall got to his feet. He had only German, and not all he wanted of that, but he gave it his best shot: “The Red Army doesn’t trust the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht doesn’t trust the Red Army. But have we English done anything to make either side distrust us? Let General Chill command. If Russian units don’t like what he proposes, let them complain to us. If we think the orders are fair, let them obey as if the commands came from Stalin. Is that a fair arrangement?”

Silence followed, save for the murmur of Vasiliev’s interpreter as he translated Bagnall’s words. After a few seconds, Chill said, “In general, weakening command is a bad idea. A commander needs all the authority over his troops he can get. But in these special circumstances-”

“The Englishmen would have to decide quickly,” Aleksandr German said. “If they cannot make up their minds, orders may become irrelevant before they give their answer.”

“That would be part of the packet,” Bagnall agreed.

“The Englishmen would also have to remember that we are all allies together here against the Lizards, and that England is not specially aligned with the Russians against the Reich,” Lieutenant General Chill said. “Decisions which fail to show this evenhandedness would make the arrangement unworkable in short order-and we would start shooting at each other again.”