Striking the Balance

She eased off on the throttle and lowered the aircraft’s huge flaps. The extra resistance they gave her cut into her airspeed astonishingly fast. Maybe she could get theStorch down in one piece after all. She leaned over and looked down through the cockpit glasshouse, almost feeling for the ground.

The touchdown was amazingly gentle. TheStorch’s landing gear had heavy springs to take up the shock of a hard descent. When the descent wasn’t hard, you hardly knew you were on the ground. Ludmila killed the engine and tromped hard on the brake. Almost before she knew it, she was stopped-and she still had fifteen or twenty meters of landing room to spare.

“Good. That was good,” one of the men holding a lantern called to her as he approached the Fieseler. The light he carried showed his toothy grin. “Where did a pack of ragtag partisans come up with such a sharp pilot?”

At the same time as he was speaking, another man-an officer by his tone-called to more men hidden in the darkness: “Come on, you lugs, get those crates over here. You think they’re going to move by themselves?” He sounded urgent and amused at the same time, a good combination for getting the best from the soldiers under his command.

“You Germans always think you’re the only ones who know anything about anything,” Ludmila told theWehrmacht man with the lantern.

His mouth fell open. She’d heard that meant something among the Lizards, but for the life of her couldn’t remember what. She thought it was pretty funny, though. The German soldier turned around and exclaimed, “Hey, Colonel, would you believe it? They’ve got a girl flying this plane.”

“I’ve run into a woman pilot before,” the officer answered. “She was a very fine one, as a matter of fact.”

Ludmila sat in the unfamiliar seat of theStorch. Her whole body seemed to have been dipped in crushed ice-or was it fire? She couldn’t tell. She stared at the instrument panel-all the gauges hard against the zero pegs now-without seeing it. She didn’t realize she’d dropped back into Russian till the words were out of her mouth: “Heinrich… is that you?”

“Mein Gott,”

the officer said quietly, out there in the cricket-chirping darkness where she could not see him. She thought that was his voice, but she hadn’t seen him for a year and a half, and never for long at any one stretch. After a moment, he tried again: “Ludmila?”

“What the hell is going on?” asked the soldier with the lantern.

Ludmila got out of the FieselerStorch. She needed to do that anyhow, to make it easier for the Germans to get the chests of ammunition into the aircraft. But even as her feet thumped down onto the ground, she felt she was flying far higher than any plane could safely go.

Jager came up to her. “You’re still alive,” he said, almost severely.

The landing lamp didn’t give enough light. She couldn’t see how he looked, not really. But now that she was looking at him, memory filled in the details the light couldn’t: the way his eyes would have little lines crinkling at the corners, the way one end of his mouth would quirk up when he was amused or just thinking hard, the gray hair at his temples.

She took a step toward him, at the same time as he was taking a step toward her. That left them close enough to step into each other’s arms. “What thehell is going on?” the soldier with the lantern repeated. Ludmila ignored him. Jager, his mouth insistent on hers, gave no sign he even heard.

From out of the night, a big, deep German voice boomed, “Well, this is sweet, isn’t it?”

Ludmila ignored that interruption, too. Jager didn’t. He ended the kiss sooner than he should have and turned toward the man who was coming up-in the night, no more than a large, looming shadow. In tones of military formality, he said,“Herr Standartenfuhrer, I introduce to you Lieutenant-”

“Senior Lieutenant,” Ludmila broke in.

“-Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova of the Red Air Force. Ludmila”-the formality broke down there-“this isStandartenfuhrer

Otto Skorzeny of theWaffen SS, my-”

“Accomplice.” Now Skorzeny interrupted. “You two are old friends, I see.” He laughed uproariously at his own understatement. “Jager, you sneaky devil, you keep all sorts of interesting things under your hat, don’t you?”

“It’s an irregular sort of war,” Jager answered, a little stiffly. Being “old friends” with a Soviet flier was likely to be as destructive to aWehrmacht man’s career-and maybe to more than that-as having that sort of relationship with a German had been dangerous for Ludmila. But he didn’t try to deny anything, saying, “You’ve worked with the Russians, too, Skorzeny.”

“Not so-intimately.” The SS man laughed again. “But screw that, too.” He chucked Jager under the chin, as if he were an indulgent uncle. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.” Whistling a tune that sounded as if it was probably salacious, he strolled back into the night.

“You-work with him?” Ludmila asked.