Tilting the Balance

As soon as he stepped over the threshold, he felt as if he’d been taken back through time. Guttering torches cast weird, flickering shadows on the irregular stonework of the wall. Up above, everything was lost in gloom. In the torchlight, the three fur-clad men who sat at a table waiting for him, weapons in front of them, seemed more like barbarian chieftains than twentieth-century soldiers.

Over the next couple of minutes, the other Englishmen came in. By the way they peered all around, they’ had the same feeling of dislocation as Bagnall. Martin Borcke pointed to one of the men at the table and said, “Here is Generalleutnant Kurt Chill, commander of the 122nd Infantry Division and now head of the forces of the Reich in and around Pskov.” He named the RAF men for his commander.

Chill didn’t look like Bagnall’s idea of a Nazi lieutenant general: no monocle, no high-peaked cap, no skinny, hawk-nosed Prussian face. He was on the roundish side and badly needed a shave. His eyes were brown, not chilly gray. They had an ironic glint in them as he said in fair English, “Welcome to the blooming gardens of Pskov, gentlemen.”

Sergei Morozkin nodded to the pair who sat to Chill’s left. “Are leaders of First and Second Partisan Brigades, Nikolai Ivanovich Vasiliev and Aleksandr Maksimovich German.”

Ken Embry whispered to Bagnall, “There’s a name I’d not fancy having in Soviet Russia these days.”

“Lord, no.” Bagnall looked at German. Maybe it was the steel-rimmed spectacles he wore, but he had a schoolmasterly expression only partly counteracted by the fierce red mustache that sprouted above his upper lip.

Vasiliev, by contrast, made the flight engineer think of a bearded boulder: he was short and squat and looked immensely strong. A pink scar-maybe a crease from a rifle bullet-furrowed one cheek and cut a track through the thick, almost seallike pelt that grew there. A couple of inches over and the partisan leader would not have been sitting in his chair.

He rumbled something in Russian. Morozkin translated: “He bid you welcome to forest republic. This we call land around Pskov while Germans rule city. Now with Lizards”-Morozkin pronounced the word with exaggerated care-“here, we make German-Soviet council-German-Soviet soviet, da?” Bagnall thought the play on words came from the interpreter; Vasiliev, even sans scar, would not have seemed a man much given to mirth.

“Pleased to meet you all, I’m sure,” Ken Embry said. Before Morozkin could translate, Jerome Jones turned his words into Russian. The partisan leaders beamed, pleased at least one of the RAF men could speak directly to them.

“What is this thing you have brought for the Soviet Union from the people and workers of England?” German asked. He leaned forward to wait for the answer, not even noticing the ideological preconceptions with which he’d freighted his question.

“An airborne radar, to help aircraft detect Lizard planes at long range,” Jones said. Both Morozkin and Borcke had trouble turning the critical word into their native languages. Jones explained what a radar set was and how it did what it did. Vasiliev simply listened. German nodded several times, as if what the radarman said made sense to him.

And Kurt Chill purred, “You have, aber naturlich, also brought one of these radar sets for the Reich?”

“No, sir,” Embry said. Bagnall started to sweat, though the room in this drafty old medieval tower was anything but warm. The pilot went on, “Our orders are to deliver this set and the manuals accompanying it to the Soviet authorities at Pskov: That is what we intend to do.”

General Chill shook his head. Bagnall sweated harder. No one had bothered to tell the RAF crew that Pskov wasn’t entirely in Soviet hands. Evidently, the Russians who’d told the English where to fly the set hadn’t thought there would be a problem. But a problem there was.

“If there is only one, it shall go to the Reich,” Chill said.

As soon as Sergei Morozkin translated the German’s English into Russian, Vasiliev snatched up the submachine gun from the table in front of him and pointed it at Chill’s chest. “Nyet,” he said flatly. Bagnall needed no Russian to follow that.

Chill answered in German, which Vasiliev evidently under stood. It also let Bagnall understand some of what was going on. The Nazi had courage, or at least bravado. He said, “If you shoot me, Nikolai Ivanovich, Colonel Schindler takes command-and we are still stronger around Pskov than you.”

Aleksandr German did not bother gesticulating with the pistol on the table. He simply spoke in a dry, rather pedantic voice that went well with his eyeglasses. His words sounded like German, but Bagnall had even more trouble with them than he had in following Kurt Chill. He guessed the partisan was actually speaking Yiddish. To stay up with that, they should have kept David Goldfarb as crew radarman.