Читаем In the Balance полностью

Without a word, Max used his free hand to pull down the collar of his peasant’s blouse and bare his neck. Jager knew a gunshot scar when he saw one. The Jew said, “I must have jerked just as the gun went off behind me. I fell down. They had bastards down in the hole with more guns, making sure everybody really was dead. They must have missed me. I hope they don’t get a fucking reprimand, you know? More people fell on me, but not too many-it was getting late. When it was dark, I managed to crawl out and get away. I’ve been killing fucking Germans ever since.”

Jager didn’t answer. He hadn’t gone out of his way to notice what happened to Jews in Russian territory taken by the Germans. Nobody in the Wehrmacht went out of his way to notice that. It wasn’t safe for your career; it might not be safe for you personally. He’d heard things. Everybody heard things. He hadn’t worried much about it. After all, the Fuhrer had declared Jews the enemies of the Reich.

But there were ways soldiers treated enemies. Lining them up at the edge of a pit and shooting them from behind wasn’t supposed to be one of those ways. Jager tried to imagine himself doing that. It wasn’t easy. But if the Reich was at war and his superior gave him the order… He shook his head. He just didn’t know.

From across the chest, less than a meter away, his Jewish yokemate watched him flounder. Watching Max watch him only made Jager flounder harder. If Jews could flip-flop from enemies of the Reich to comrades-in-arms, that just made massacring them all the harder to stomach.

Max’s voice was sly. “You maybe have a fucking conscience?”

“Of course I have a conscience,” Jager said indignantly. Then he shut up again. If he had a conscience, as he’d automatically claimed, how was he supposed to ignore what Germany might well have been doing? (Even in his own mind, he didn’t want to phrase it any more definitely than that.).

To his relief, the woods started thinning out ahead. That meant the most dangerous part of the mission-crossing open country with what they’d stolen from the Lizards-lay ahead. Beside the abyss whose edge he’d been treading with Max, physical danger suddenly seemed a welcome diversion. As long as be was putting his own life on the line, he’d be too busy to look down into the abyss and see the people piled there with neat holes in the backs of their necks.

The survivors of the raiding party gathered near the edge of the trees. Skorzeny took charge of them. From under the thick layer of dead leaves, he pulled out several chests which looked the same as the one Jager and Max carried but were not lead-lined. “Two men to each one,” he ordered, pausing to let the Russian partisans who understood German translate for those who didn’t. “We scatter now, two by two, to make it as hard as we can for the Lizards to figure out who has the real one.”

One of the partisans said, “How do we know the real one will go where it’s supposed to?”

All the worn, dirty men, Russians and Germans alike, nodded at that. They still had no great trust in one another; they’d fought too hard for that. Skorzeny said, “We have one from each side holding the prize. The panje wagon that’s waiting for them has one from each side, too. If they don’t try to murder each other, we’ll be all right, ja?”

The SS man laughed to show he’d made a joke. Jager looked over to Max. The Jew was not laughing. He wore the expression Jager had often seen on junior officers who faced a tough tactical problem: he was weighing his options. That meant Jager had to weigh his, too.

Skorzeny said, “We’ll go out one pair at a time. The team with the real chest will go third.”

“Who told you you were God?” a partisan asked.

The SS man’s scarred cheek crinkled as he gave an impudent grin. “Who told you I wasn’t?” He waited a moment to see if he got any more argument. When he didn’t, he swatted a man from the pair closest to him on the shoulder and shouted “Go! Go! Go!” as if they were paratroopers diving out of a Ju-52 transport plane.

The second pair followed a moment later. Then Skorzeny yelled “Go! Go! Go!” again and Jager and Max burst out of the woods and started off toward the promised panje wagon. It waited several kilometers north and west, outside the Lizards’ tightest security zone. Jager wanted to sprint the whole way. Slogging through mud carrying a heavy chest, that wasn’t practical.

“I’m fucking sick of rain,” Max said, though he knew as well as Jager that the snow which would follow was even harder to endure.

Jager said, “Right now I don’t mind rain at all. The Lizards will have a harder time chasing us through it than they would on dry ground. The low clouds will make us harder to spot through the air, too. If you want to get right down to it, I wouldn’t mind fog, either.”

“I would,” Max said. “We’d get lost.”

“I have a compass.”