Striking the Balance

“Oh, Jager, dear,” Otto Skorzeny said in scratchy falsetto. Heinrich Jager looked up in surprise; he hadn’t heard Skorzeny come up. The SS man laughed at him. “Stop mooning over that Russian popsy of yours and pay attention. I need something from you.”

“She isn’t a popsy,” Jager said. Skorzeny laughed louder. The panzer colonel went on, “If she were a popsy, I don’t suppose I’d be mooning over her.”

The half admission got through to Skorzeny, who nodded. “All right, something to that. But even if she’s the Madonna, stop mooning over her. You know our friends back home have sent us a present, right?”

“Hard not to know it,” Jager agreed. “More of you damned SS men around than you can shake a stick at, every stinking one of them with a Schmeisser and a look in his eye that says he’d just as soon shoot you as give you the time of day. I’ll bet I even know what kind of present it is, too.” He didn’t say what kind of present he thought it was, not because he believed he might be wrong but from automatic concern for security.

“I’ll bet you do,” Skorzeny said. “Why shouldn’t you? You’ve known about this stuff as long as I have, ever since those days outside Kiev.” He said no more after that, but it was plenty. They’d stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in the Ukraine.

“What are you going to do with-it?” Jager asked cautiously.

“Are you thick in the head?” Skorzeny demanded. “I’m going to blow the kikes in Lodz to hell and gone, is what I’m going to do, and their chums the Lizards, and all the poor damned Poles in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He laughed again. “There’s the story of Poland in a sentence,nicht wahr?

The poor damned Poles, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I presume you have authorization for this?” Jager said, not presuming any such thing. If anybody could lay hands on an atomic bomb for his own purposes, Otto Skorzeny was the man.

But not this time. Skorzeny’s big head went up and down. “You bet your arse I do: from theReichsfuhrer-SS and straight from the Fuhrer himself. Both of ’em in my attache case. You want to gape at fancy autographs?”

“Never mind.” In a way, Jager was relieved-if Himmler and Hitler had signed off on this, at least Skorzeny wasn’t running wild… or no wilder than usual, at any rate. Still-“Strikes me as a waste of a bomb. There’s nothing threatening coming out of Lodz. Look what happened the last time the Lizards even tried sending something up our way through the town: it got here late and chewed up, thanks to what happened down there.”

“Oh, yes, the Jews did us a hell of a favor.” Skorzeny rolled his eyes. “When they hit the Lizards, the bastards all wore German uniforms, so they didn’t get blamed for it-we did. I did in particular, as a matter of fact. The Lizards bribed a couple of Poles with scope-sighted rifles to come up here and go Skorzeny-hunting to see if they could pay me back.”

“You’re still here,” Jager noted.

“You noticed that, did you?” Skorzeny made as if to kiss him on the cheek. “You’re such a clever boy. And both the Poles are dead, too. It took a while-we know to the zloty how big their payoff was.” His smile showed teeth; maybe he was remembering how the Poles perished. But then he looked grim. “Lieutenant-Colonel Brockelmann is dead, too. Unlucky son of a whore happened to be about my size. One of the Poles blew off the top of his head from behind at about a thousand meters. Damn fine shooting, I must say. I complimented the fellow on it as I handed him his trigger finger.”

“I’m sure he appreciated that,” Jager said dryly. Associating with Skorzeny had rubbed his nose in all the uglier parts of warfare, the parts he hadn’t had to think about as a panzer commander. Mass murder, torture… he hadn’t signed up for those. But they were part of the package whether he’d signed up for them or not. Was destroying a city where the people were doing theReich

more good than harm? Was their being Jews reason enough? Was their having piqued Skorzeny for not letting him destroy them on his first try reason enough? He’d have to think about that-and he couldn’t waste too much time doing it, either. Meanwhile, he asked, “So what am I supposed to do about all this? What’s the favor you have in mind? I’ve never been into Lodz, you know.”

“Oh, yes, I know that.” Skorzeny stretched like a tiger deciding he was too full to go hunting right now. “If you had been in Lodz, you’d be talking with theSicherheitsdienst or theGestapo now, not me.”

“I’ve talked with them before.” Jager shrugged, trying not to show the stab of alarm he felt.