Striking the Balance

David Nussboym stared at them as avidly as if they were women. He spoke their language. He wondered if anyone else in the whole camp did.

IX

Mutt Daniels eyed the boat with something less than enthusiasm. “Damn,” he said feelingly. “When they said they weren’t shippin’ us back to Chicago from Elgin, I reckoned they couldn’t do no worse to us than what we seen there. Shows how blame much I know, don’t it?”

“You got that right, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Herman Muldoon said. “This whole mission, the way they talk about it, it’s a ‘deeply regret’ telegram just waitin’ to happen. Or it would be, I mean. If they still bothered sending those telegrams any more.”

“That will be enough of that, gentlemen,” Captain Stan Szymanski said. “They tapped us on the shoulder for this job, and we are going to do it.”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt said. The unspoken corollary to Szymanski’s comment was,or die trying, which struck Mutt as likely. If it struck Szymanski as likely, too, he didn’t let on. Maybe he was a good actor; that was part of being a good officer, same as it was for being a good manager. Or maybe Szymanski didn’t really believe, not down deep, that his own personal private self could ever stop existing. If Szymanski was thirty yet, Mutt figured he was the King of England.

Mutt was getting close to sixty. The possibility of his own imminent extinction felt only too real. Even before the Lizards came, too many of the friends he’d had since the turn of the century and before had up and dropped dead on him, from heart disease or cancer or TB. Throw bullets and shell fragments into the mix and a fellow got the idea he was living on borrowed time.

“We’ll have the advantage of surprise,” Szymanski said.

Of course we will,Mutt thought.The Lizards’ll be surprised-hell, they’ll be amazed-we could be so stupid. He couldn’t say that out loud, worse luck.

Captain Szymanski pulled a much-folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “Let’s have a look at the map,” he said.

Daniels and Muldoon crowded close. The map wasn’t anything fancy from the Army Corps of Engineers. Mutt recognized it at once: it had come from a Rand McNally road atlas, the same kind of map bus drivers had used to get his minor-league teams from one little town to the next. He’d used them himself when the drivers got lost, which they did with depressing regularity.

Szymanski pointed. “The Lizards are holding the territory on the eastern side of the Illinois River, here. Havana, right on the eastern bank where the Spoon flows into the Illinois, is the key to their position along this stretch of the river, and they’ve got one of their prison camps right outside of town. Our objective is breaking in there and getting some of those people out. If we can do it here, maybe we’ll be able to do it down at Cairo and even in St Louis. If we’re going to win this war, we have to break their grip on the Mississippi.”

“Sir, let’s us worry about doin’ this here little one right,” Mutt said. “We manage that, then the brass can start thinkin’ big.”

Herman Muldoon nodded vigorously. After a moment, so did Szymanski. “That makes sense,” he said. “I’ve been promised that we’ll have one hell of a diversion laid on when we go tonight. I don’t mean just the stuff on the Spoon River, either. We already know about that; it’s part of the basic plan. But this’ll be something special. I know that much, even if they haven’t told me what it’ll be.”

“Air support?” Muldoon asked, his voice eager. “When they have some, they don’t want to talk about it, in case somebody gets nabbed and spills his guts.”

“I don’t know, and what I don’t know I can’t tell you,” Szymanski answered. “If you want to make like that proves your point, go ahead. Don’t go telling the troops that’s what it is, though, because if it turns out not to be, their morale will suffer. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Muldoon said. Mutt nodded. If there wasn’t any air support, or some kind of pretty juicy diversion, a lot more than their morale would suffer. He didn’t say anything about that. Szymanski was still a kid, but he wasn’t a fool. He could figure things out for himself.

“Any more questions?” Szymanski asked. Mutt didn’t say anything. Neither did Muldoon. The captain folded up the map again and stuck it back in his pocket. “Okay, then. We wait for nightfall and we do it.” He got up and went off to brief his other platoon.

“He makes it sound easy,” Mutt said. He peered out through the screen of willow branches that hung down into the water and-he devoutly hoped-kept the Lizards on the other side of the Illinois from figuring out what the Americans were up to.