Tilting the Balance

“Supply the answer and win the tin of chopped ham, retail value ten shillings,” Embry chanted, like an announcer over the wireless. “Send your postal card to the Soviet Embassy, London. Winners-if there are any, which strikes me as unlikely-will be selected in a drawing at random.”

After another ten or fifteen minutes, the lake abruptly ended. A city full of towers appeared ahead. Some had the onion domes Bagnall associated with Russian architecture, while others looked as if they were wearing witches’ hats. The more modern buildings in town were scarcely worth noticing among such exotics.

“Right-here’s Pskov,” Embry said. “Where’s the bloody airfield?”

Down in the snow-filled streets, people scattered like ants when the Lancaster flew by. Through the bomber’s Perspex windscreen, Bagnall spied little flashes of light. “They’re shooting at us!” he yelled.

“Stupid sods,” Embry snarled. “Don’t they know we’re friendly? Now where’s that bleeding airfield?”

Away to the east, a red flare rose into the sky. The pilot swung the big heavy aircraft in that direction. Sure enough, a landing strip appeared ahead, hacked out of the surrounding forest. “It’s none too long,” Bagnall observed.

“It’s what we’ve got.” Embry pushed forward on the stick. The Lancaster descended. The pilot was one of the best. He set the bomber down at the back edge of the landing strip and used up every inch braking to a stop. The tree trunks ahead were looking very thick and very hard when the Lancaster finally quit moving. Embry looked as if he needed to will himself to let go of the stick, but his voice was relaxed as he said, “Welcome to beautiful, balmy Pskov. You have to be balmy to want to come here.”

No sooner had the Lancaster’s three-bladed props spun to a stop than men in greatcoats and thick padded jackets dashed out of the trees to start draping it with camouflage netting. Groundcrews had done that back in England, but never with such elan. The outside world disappeared in a hurry; Bagnall could only hope the bomber disappeared from outside view as quickly.

“Did you see?” Embry asked quietly as he disconnected his safety belt.

“See what?” Bagnall asked, also freeing himself.

“Those weren’t all Russians out there covering us up. Some of them were Germans.”

“Bloody hell,” Bagnall muttered. “Are we supposed to give them the airborne radar, too? That wasn’t in our orders.”

Alf Whyte stuck his head out from the little black-curtained cubicle where he labored with map and ruler and compasses and protractor. “Before the Lizards came, Pskov was headquarters for Army Group North. The Lizards ran Jerry out, but then they left themselves when winter started. It’s Russian enough now for us to land here, obviously, but I expect there will be some leftover Nazis as well.”

“Isn’t that wonderful?” By Embry’s tone, it was anything but.

The cold hit like a blow in the face when the aircrew left the Lanc. They were an abbreviated lot, pilot, flight engineer (Bagnall doubled as radioman), navigator, and radarman. No bomb-aimer on this run, no bombardiers, and no gunners in the turrets. If a Lizard jet attacked, machine guns weren’t going to be able to reply to its cannon and rockets.

“Zdrast’ye,” Ken Embry said, thereby exhausting his Russian. “Does anyone here speak English?”

“I do,” two men said, one with a Russian accent, the other in Germanic tones. They looked suspiciously at each other. Some months of joint battle against a common foe had not eased the memory of what they’d been doing to each other before the Lizards came.

Bagnall had done some German before he left college to join the RAF. That was only three years ago, but already most of it had vanished from his brain. Like most undergraduates taking German, he’d come upon Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language.” That he remembered, especially the bit about sooner declining two beers than one German adjective. And Russian was worse-even the alphabet looked funny.

To Bagnall’s surprise, Jerome Jones started speaking Russian-halting Russian, but evidently good enough to be understood. After a brief exchange, he turned back to the air crew and said, “He-Sergei Leonidovich Morozkin there, the chap who knows a bit of English-says we’re to accompany him to the Krom, the local strongpoint, I gather.”

“By all means let us accompany him, then,” Embry said. “I didn’t know you had any Russian, Jones. The chaps who put this mission together had a better notion of what they were about than I credited them for.”

“I doubt that, sir,” Jones said, unwilling to give RAF higher-ups any credit for sense. But he had reason on his side: “When I was at Cambridge, I was interested for a while in Byzantine history and art, and that led me to the Russians. I hadn’t the time to do them properly, but I did teach myself a bit of the language. That wouldn’t be in any of my papers, though, so no one would have known of it.”