In the Balance (8 page)

No one in his most horrid nightmares imagined the Germans had already devised not just a pile but a bomb, even if the uranium atom had first been split in Germany in 1938. As he ran, Larssen wondered how the Nazis had exploded a bomb over Chicago. So far as he knew, their planes couldn’t reach even New York.

For that matter, he wondered why the Germans had set off their bomb so high overhead—too high, really, for it to do any damage. Maybe, he thought, they had it aboard some oceanbestriding rocket like the ones the pulp magazines talked about. But no one had dreamed the Germans could do that, either.

Nothing about the bomb made any rational sense. The dreadful thing was up there, though, and had to be German. It surely wasn’t American or English.

Larssen had an even more horrid thought. What if it was Japanese? He didn’t think the Japs had the know-how to build an atomic bomb, but he hadn’t thought they had the know-how to bomb Pearl Harbor so devastatingly well, or to take the Philippines, or Guam, or Wake, or Hong Kong and Singapore and Burma from the British, or practically drive the Royal Navy out of the Indian Ocean, or … The further he went, the longer the melancholy list in his head grew.

“Maybe it
is
the goddamn Japs,” he said, and ran harder than ever.

Sam Yeager had the curtain closed over the train window by his seat, to keep the westering sun out of Bobby Fiore’s eyes while his roommate slept. In his younger days, he would have resented that: having grown up without traveling more than a couple of days’ ride from his folks’ farm, he was wild to see as much of the country as he could when he started playing ball. Train and bus windows were his openings on a wider world.

“I’ve seen the country, all right,” he muttered. He’d rolled through just about every piece of it, with swings into Canada and Mexico to boot. Rubbernecking for one more swing through the staid flatlands of Illinois no longer meant as much as it once had.

He remembered the sun rising over the arid mountains near Salt Lake City, shining off the lake and the white salt flats straight into his dazzled eyes. Now that had been scenery worth looking at; he’d carry the picture to his grave with him. Fields and barns and ponds just couldn’t compete, though he wouldn’t have lived in Salt Lake City for Joe DiMaggio’s salary.
Well, maybe for DiMaggio’s salary
, he thought.

A lot of the Commodores had headed off to the dining car. Across the aisle, Joe Sullivan was staring out the window with the same avidity Yeager had known in his early days. The pitcher’s lips moved as he softly read a Burma Shave sign to himself. That made Yeager smile. Sullivan needed to lather up maybe twice a week.

Suddenly, bright light streamed in through the windows on the pitcher’s side of the car. He craned his neck. “Funny thing in the sky,” he reported. “Looks like a Fourth of July firework, but it’s an awful damn bright one.”

Mutt Daniels was sitting on that side of the train, too. “Awful damn bright one is right,” the manager said. “Never seen one like that in all my born days. It just keeps hangin’ up there, don’t seem to move a-tall. Kind of pretty, matter of fact.”

The light went from white to yellow to orange to red, fading little by little over several minutes. Yeager thought about getting up and having a look at where it was coming from. He might have done it if Sullivan hadn’t compared
it to something you’d see on the Fourth of July. Ever since the Fourth when he broke his ankle, he’d had no use for fireworks. He stuck his nose back into his
Astounding
.

The rising sun snuck under Heinrich Jäger’s eyelids, pried his eyes open. He groaned, shook a few of the cobwebs out of his head, got slowly to his feet. Moving as if every joint in his body were rusty, he got in line for breakfast. More kasha stew, his nose told him. He shrugged. It would keep him full.

“No more lights in the sky?” he asked Ernst Riecke, who looked as tired as he felt.

“No, sir,” the captain answered. “I don’t know if I should have bothered you, but—”

“You did the right thing,” Jäger said, mentally adding,
even if it did cost me another hour in my blanket
. “I don’t know what the devil that was. It looked like one of our recognition flares, but it was a million times as big and bright. And it didn’t fall, either. It stayed in one place till it went out. I wonder what it was.”

“One of Ivan’s tricks, maybe,” Riecke suggested.

“Maybe,” But Jäger didn’t believe it. “If it was, though, he should have followed it up. No bombers, no artillery … If the Russians were trying something, it didn’t work.”

Like the rest of the tankmen, Jäger gulped down his stew. When everyone was fed, he reluctantly sent the field kitchen on its way. He hated to part with it, but it wouldn’t be able to keep up with the tanks.

One after another, the Panzer IIIs rumbled into life. The whole company let out a cheer when the motor of the twelfth tank caught. Jäger shouted as loud as anybody. He didn’t think they’d be facing enemy armor today, but you never could tell in Russia. And if not today, then one day before too long.

He clambered up into the turret of the tank he personally commanded, radioed division headquarters to see if orders had changed since yesterday. “No, we still want you to shift to map square B-9,” the signal lieutenant answered. “How do you read my transmission, by the way?”

“Well enough,” Jäger said. “Why?”

“We had some trouble earlier,” the signalman answered. “After that explosion in the sky, reception went into the toilet for a while. Glad it didn’t trouble you.”

“Me, too,” Jäger said. “Out.” He unfolded his map, studied it. If he was where he thought he was, he and his panzers needed to make about twenty kilometers to get to where they were supposed to be. He leaned down into the crew compartment of the tank, called to the driver. “Let’s go. East.”

“East it is.” Dieter Schmidt put the Panzer III into gear. The roar of the Maybach HL120TR engine changed pitch. The tank began to roll ahead, chewing two lines through the grass and dirt of the steppe. The engine went up the scale and down, up and down, as Schmidt worked his way through the six forward speeds of the gearbox.

The dustbin cupola at the back of the turret gave a decent view even when closed down. Like any tank commander worth his black coveralls, Jäger left it open and stood up in it whenever he could. Not only could he see more than even through good periscopes, the air was fresher and cooler and the racket less—or at least different. He traded being surrounded by engine rumble for the iron clash and rattle of the spare wheels and tracks lashed to the tank’s rear deck.

He frowned a little. If the German logistics train were better run, he wouldn’t have had to carry his own spares to make sure they were there when he needed them. But the eastern front ran more than three thousand kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Expecting the high foreheads who were out of harm’s way to care what happened to any one tank commander was too much to hope for.

The panzers rolled through the detritus of battle, past graves hastily dug in the rich dark soil of the Ukraine; past stinking, bloated Russian corpses still unburied; past wrecked trucks and tanks of both the
Wehrmacht
and the Red Army. German engineers swarmed over those like flies over the corpses, salvaging whatever they could.

The gently rolling country stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. Not even war’s wounds scarred it too Severely. Sometimes when Jäger looked out across that sea of green, his dozen tanks seemed all alone. He grinned when, off in the distance, he spied a German infantry company.

Once or twice, planes buzzed by overhead. That made him grin more widely. Somewhere east of Izyum, Ivan was going to catch hell.

A noise like the end of the world—the panzer a couple of hundred meters to his right went up in a fireball. One second it was there, the next nothing but red and yellow flame and a column of black, greasy smoke mounting to the sky. A moment later came the barks of secondary explosions as the tank’s ammunition began going off. The five-man crew couldn’t have known what hit them. Jäger told himself that, anyhow, as he dove down inside the turret.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Georg Schultz. The gunner had heard the blast through thick steel and through the racket of his own tank’s motor.

“Joachim’s tank just went up,” Jäger answered. “Must have bit a mine—but the Ivans aren’t supposed to have laid any mines around here.” His voice showed his doubt, the explosion had been very violent for a mine.
Maybe if the blast went up into the gas tank
, the captain thought. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind then another panzer went up with an even louder detonation than the first.

“Jesus!” Schultz shouted. He stared fearfully at the metal floor of the tank, as if wondering when a white-hot jet of flame would burst through it.

Jäger grabbed for the radio that linked him with the rest of the company, hit the all-hands frequency. “All halt!” he bawled. “We’re hitting mines.” He shouted the order forward to Dieter Schmidt, then stood up in the cupola to make sure it was being obeyed.

The ten surviving tanks of the company did stop. The rest of the commanders bounced up just like Jäger, each of them trying to see what was going on. But for two blazing hulks, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Jäger was about to call divisional headquarters to ask for a sapper detachment when a lance of fire tore across the sky and blew the turret clean off one of the stopped panzers. The oily chassis promptly began to burn.

Cursing his own mistake, Jäger let himself fall back into the turret. He grabbed the radio, screamed, “Get moving! They’re rockets from the air, not mines! The Ivans must have found some way to mount
Kasyushas
on their ground-attack planes. If we stay where we are, we’re sitting ducks.” He didn’t need to relay the order to Schmidt this time; his Panzer III was already lurching ahead, the engine roaring flat out.

Only as the captain went up into the cupola again did he consciously realize the trail of fire in the sky had come from the west, from behind him. “Turn the turret around!” he yelled, and cursed the hydraulics as the heavy dome of metal ever so slowly began to traverse. A couple of the other commanders had been more alert. Their tanks’ turrets were already slewing to the rear.

Jäger turned that way himself. As he did so, a fourth panzer was hit in the engine compartment. Flames began to spurt. Turret doors flew open; men started bailing out. One, two, three … commander, gunner, loader. Fire washed over the whole tank. The driver and hull gunner never had a chance.

The company commander frantically scanned the sky. Where was the Stormovik, the armored Russian attack plane that was likeliest to be carrying
Katyusha
rockets? His heart leapt when he spotted a flying shape. The coaxial 7.92mm machine guns of the company’s faster-reacting panzers spat flame at it. They weren’t likely to hurt it, but might keep the pilot from making a low firing run.

They didn’t. Here he came. Jäger got ready to throw himself behind the turret’s armor the instant the Stormovik’s guns started shooting back. Then, as the plane drew swiftly nearer, he noticed it wasn’t a Stormovik. And when it fired, its whole blunt nose went yellow-white with the muzzle
blast. Dust fountained around two more panzers. Both of them stopped dead. Smoke poured from them. Along with the reek of flaming gas and oil and cordite, Jäger’s nose caught the roast-pork stink of burning human flesh.

The airplane passed overhead, almost close enough to touch. In spite of everything, Jäger stared at it in disbelief. It was almost the size of a medium bomber, and had no propeller he could see. It bore neither the German cross and swastika nor the Soviet star; in fact, it bore no device at all on its camouflaged wings and body. And it did not roar like every other airplane he had ever known—it shrieked, as if its motive power came from damned souls.

Then it was gone, vanishing into the east more swiftly than any fighter Jäger knew. He gaped after it, mouth fallen open in most unofficerlike fashion. One pass, and half his company was flaming wreckage.

Like his own, Ernst Riecke’s panzer had survived the onslaught. It came rattling over. Riecke was standing up in his cupola. The captain’s face bore the same expression of stunned disbelief Jäger knew his own did. “What—” Riecke had to try twice before he could get the words out. “What the devil was that?”

“I don’t know.” Jäger found an even worse question: “What if it comes back?”

The Japanese were looting the village. They’d already shot a couple of people for protesting when their possessions were hauled away. The bodies lay as mute warnings in the square beside the ruined wall of the yamen. As if they did not suffice, the invading soldiers swaggered around with fixed bayonets, ready to spit anyone who gave them so much as a hard look.

Liu Han had done her best to make herself invisible to the Japanese. She knew how they recruited their pleasure battalions. Ashes grayed her hair, charcoal added not just filth but also lines to her face, giving her the look of a much older woman. Grief made it easy for her to assume the stooped posture of the elderly. She wandered aimlessly around the edges of the village, in part to keep away from the soldiers, in part because, with home and family gone, she had nothing better to do.

Because she kept away from the noisy chaos that engulfed invaders and townsfolk alike, she might have been the first to hear the thuttering in the air. Her head came up in fright—more bombers on the way? But surely not, not when the village already lay under the Japanese boot.

Or could they be Chinese planes? If the Kuomintang government wanted to hold Hankow, it would need to fight back with everything it had. And the noise was growing from the south! Fear and excitement warred within Liu Han. She wanted the Japanese dead, but did she wish to die with them?

In spite of her anguish, she decided she wanted to live. Stoop forgotten, she ran for the woods—the farther from the village when bombs began to fall, the better. The drone of approaching aircraft swelled in her ears.