Astronomy(33)

“Trust me,” he vowed. “They are the scourge of Eastern Europe.”

Susan nodded: of course. No doubt this was just an off day.

The Russian fished their travel permit out of the dirt. While he read it, he rubbed at a greasy film of beard that covered his jowls.

“You obtained this permit from Marshal Zhukov.” The man spoke in exact English. He hmmed to himself. “I radioed a message to the field offices of Marshal Zhukov the last time we were able to break through radio interference. I got no response.” The man looked up at Charley Shrieve. “When you spoke to Marshal Zhukov, did he happen to mention anything about relieving us?”

Shrieve had not, strictly speaking, communicated with the marshal. This seemed a poor time to bring that out. He shrugged, smiled. “Sorry.”

“They’ve misplaced us again.” The Russian wadded up the travel permit in an angry gesture. “They probably don’t even know we’re here.”

“You know,” Susan said. “That’s our permit out of here as well as our permit in.”

The Russian frowned at her in an interested way. “And who would you be? You are American gangster moll?”

“I am an American Foreign Service officer,” she corrected him. Cap F, cap S.” God, she was tired of explaining to men like this what she was doing in their war.

“You are a spook.” He smiled.

Charley Shrieve stepped forward to smooth things out. He suggested they not discuss background and pedigree. “We’ve all been sent here for the same thing.” He pointed at the glassified plain as it stretched east of the wire perimeter. “Our governments want to know what happened out there.”

“You wish to know what could destroy reservoir?”

“Whatever happened up here might still pose a threat to Soviet citizens.” Susan referred to Heisenberg’s bomb program, to atomic radiation drifting east toward the wheat fields of central Asia.

The Russian could barely contain his amusement. He repeated her remark in Russian. His young brigade laughed as well, in a distinctly unpleasant way.

“Come,” the man said. “Dusk is at hand. You have to get inside the camp, away from the perimeter.”

He barked an order to his charges. They formed up a little honor guard, or maybe a firing squad, and followed the four of them through the concertina wire.

The man was a lieutenant. His name was Illyenov. Yevgeni Illyenov, from Soviet Georgia. He’d fought Panzer tanks with nothing but bottles of gasoline. He had chased them back across the frozen steppes to the Danube River.

Now, while his comrades took what he imagined to be the pleasures of Berlin, Illyenov was guarding a dry lakebed with a bunch of school kids.

He led them past a line of deep-dug trenches already flooded with something that smelled like tar. Past piles of loose mortar rounds and belts for the heavy machine guns. Past a line of broken iron that might have been a Güterzuglokomotiven—a freight train engine (except how could that be right when the tracks had run along the shore of the lake? And the shore must have been a quarter of a mile away?).

—Past all that awaited the operational headquarters for the entire Soviet presence at Faulkenberg Reservoir. A wooden truck bed was laid across a stack of empty ammunition cases for use as a table. It was scattered over with papers and tin cups of some chemical-smelling liquid. Here was the dubious phonograph, fed by its small assortment of American show tunes.

A banner proclaiming the glory of the Oktober 15th Brigade flapped in the smoke and breeze of this tremendous campfire. Susan held her hand to her face against the heat. The smoke was even worse. Fresh saplings were being layered into the pile as they arrived. The smoke that rolled off of it was already choking.

Illyenov pointed across the fire to a gang of kids swarming over the tower Susan had seen from the camp entrance.

Whatever its purpose, Illyenov was inordinately proud. He had Charley by the arm. He was telling Charley how they had run across a downed British Lysander coming through Gölwegn Pass. They had scavenged the engine.

“My men thought me crazy. ‘What will Illyenov do with that airplane motor?’ Yes? You learn on battlefield. There is use for everything!”

It hung in a cradle of chains from a piece of the Lysander’s airframe. It had been restored to its original aerodynamic housing. The whole thing rolled around on wheels scavenged from one of their trucks.

Torque load was accounted for with a long bar through the axle. Put a kid over here to hold his end up, put a kid over there to hold his end down. Add a couple kids for steerage and ballast, a fifth to mind the fuel and electric lines, and hope that nobody ended up in the fire.