Ready for the Fatherland

We win. The Nazis win. Does that cover the waterfront for World War II? Not quite. There’s one other possibility—a military stalemate, followed by a peace of exhaustion. That’s the world of “Ready for the Fatherland.” This story was written before Yugoslavia self-destructed, but I take no great credit for prophecy—anyone who’d watched the Balkans a bit could see that that was in the cards. Much of the local color comes courtesy of my wife, who’s been to Rijeka.


19 February 1943—Zaporozhye, German-Occupied USSR

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein looked up from the map table. Was that the distant rumble of Soviet artillery? No, he decided after a moment. The Russians were in Sinelnikovo today, yes, but Sinelnikovo was still fifty-five kilometers north of his headquarters. Of course, there were no German troops to speak of between there and here, but that would not matter—if he could make Hitler listen to him.

Hitler, however, was not listening. He was talking. He always talked more than he listened—if he’d listened just once,Manstein thought, Sixth Army might have gotten out of Stalingrad, in which case the Russians would not be anywhere near Sinelnikovo.They’d come more than six hundred kilometers since November.

“No, not one more step back!” Hitler shouted. The Führer had shouted that when the Russians broke through around Stalingrad, too. Couldn’t he remember from one month to the next what worked and what didn’t? Behind him, Generals Jodl and Keitel nodded like the brainless puppets they were.

Manstein glanced over at Field Marshal von Kleist. Kleist was a real soldier, surely he would tell theFührerwhat had to be said. But Kleist just stood there. Against the Russians, he was fearless. Hitler, though, Hitler made him afraid.

On my shoulders,Manstein thought. Why, ever since Stalingrad, has everything—everything save gratitude—landed on my shoulders?Had it not been for him, the whole German southern front in Russia would have come crashing down. Without false modesty, he knew that. Sometimes—not nearly often enough—Hitler glimpsed it, too.

One more try at talking sense into theFührer, then. Manstein bent over the map, pointed. “Weneedto let the Soviets advance, sir. Soon, soon they will overextend themselves. Thenwe strike.”

“No, damn it, damn you! Move on Kharkov now, I tell you!”

SS Panzer DivisionTotenkopf,the force with which he wanted Kharkov recaptured, was stuck in the mud outside Poltava, a hundred fifty kilometers away. Manstein said as much. He’d been saying it, over and over, for the past forty-eight hours. Calmly, rationally, he tried once more: “I am sorry, my Führer, but we simply lack the resources to carry out the attack as you desire. A little more patience, a little more caution, and we may yet achieve satisfactory results. Move too soon and we run the risk of—“

“I did not fly to this godforsaken Russian excuse for a factory town to listen to the whining of your cowardly Jewish heart, Field Marshal.” Hitler invested the proud title with withering scorn. “And from now on you will keep your gross, disgusting Jewish nose out of strategic planning and simply obey. Do you understand me?”

Manstein’s right hand went to the organ Hitler had mentioned. It was indeed of impressive proportions and impressively hooked. But to bring it up, to insult it, in what should have been a serious council of war was—insanewas the word Manstein found. As insane as most of the decisions Hitler had made, most of the orders he had given, ever since he’d taken all power into his own hands at the end of 1941, and especially since things began to go wrong at Stalingrad.

Insane . . . Of itself, Manstein’s hand slid down from his nose to the holster that held his Walther P-38 pistol. Of itself, it unsnapped the holster flap. And of itself, it raised the pistol and fired three shots into Adolf Hitler’s chest. Wearing a look of horrified disbelief, theFührercrumpled to the floor.

Generals Jodl and Keitel looked almost as appalled as Hitler had. So did Field Marshal von Kleist, but he recovered faster. He snatched out his own pistol, covered Hitler’s toadies.

Manstein still felt as if he were moving in a dream, but even in a dream he was a General Staff–taught officer, trained to deduce what needed doing. “Excellent, Paul,” he said. “First we must dispose of the carrion there, then devise a story to account for it in suitably heroic style.”

Kleist nodded. “Very good. And then—“

“And then—” Manstein cocked his head. Yes, by God, he did hear Russian artillery. “This campaign has been botched beyond belief. Given the present state of affairs, I see no reasonable hope of our winning the war against the Russians. Do you agree?”

Kleist nodded again.

“Very good,” Manstein said. “In that case, let us make certain we do not lose it. . . .”

27 July 1979—Rijeka, Independent State of Croatia

The little fishing boat put-putted its way toward the harbor. The man who called himself Giorgio Ferrero already wore a black wool fisherman’s cap. He used his hand to shield his eyes further. Seen through the clear Adriatic air, the rugged Croatian coastline seemed almost unnaturally sharp, as if he were wearing a new pair of spectacles that were a little too strong.

“Pretty country,” Ferrero said. He spoke Italian with the accent of Ancona.

So did Pietro Bevacqua, to whom he’d addressed the remark: “That it is.” Bevacqua and Ferrero were both medium-sized, medium-dark men who would not have seemed out of place anywhere in the Mediterranean. Around a big pipe full of vile Italian tobacco, Bevacqua added, “No matter how pretty, though, me, I wish I were back home.” He took both hands off the boat’s wheel to show by gesture just how much he wished that.

Ferrero chuckled. He went up to the bow. Bevacqua guided the boat to a pier. Ferrero sprang up onto the dock, rope in hand. He tied the boat fast. Before he could finish, a pair of Croatian customs men were heading his way.

Their neatly creased khaki uniforms, high-crowned caps, gleaming jackboots, and businesslike assault rifles all bespoke their nation’s German alliance. The faces under those caps, long, lined, dark, with the deep-set eyes of icons, were older than anything Germany dreamed of. “Show me your papers,” one of them said.

“Here you are, sir.” Ferrero’s Croatian was halting, accented, but understandable. He dug the documents out of the back pocket of his baggy wool pants.

The customs man studied them, passed them to his comrade. “You are from the Social Republic, eh?” the second man said. He grinned nastily. “Not from Sicily?”

Ferrero crossed himself. “Mother of God, no!” he exclaimed in Italian. Sicily was a British puppet regime; admitting one came from there was as good as admitting one was a spy. One did not want to admit to spying, not in Croatia. TheUstashi had a reputation for savagery that even theGestapo envied. Ferrero went on, in Croatian again, “From Ancona, like you see. Got a load of eels on ice to sell here, my partner and I.”

“Ah.” Both customs men looked interested. The one with the nasty grin said, “Maybe our wives will buy some for pies, if they get to market.”

“Take some now,” Ferrero urged. If he hadn’t urged it, the eels would not have got to market. He knew that. The pair of fifty-dinar notes folded in with his papers had disappeared now, too. The Croatian fascists were only cheap imitations of their German prototypes, who would have cost much more to bribe.

Once they had the eels in a couple of sacks, the customs men gave only a cursory glance at Bevacqua’s papers (though they did not fail to pocket his pair of fifty-dinar notes, either) and at the rest of the ship’s cargo. They plied rubber stamps with vigor and then strode back down the dock, obviously well pleased with themselves.

The fishermen followed them. The fish market was, sensibly, close to the wharves. Another uniformed official demanded papers before he let Ferrero and Bevacqua by. The sight of the customs men’s stamps impressed him enough that he didn’t even have to be paid off.

“Eels!” Ferrero shouted in his bad but loud Croatian. “Eels from Italian waters! Eels!” A crowd soon formed around him. Eels went one way, dinars another. While Ferrero cried the wares and took money, Bevacqua kept trotting back and forth between market and boat, always bringing more eels.

A beefy man pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He bought three hundred dinars’ worth of eels, shoving a fat wad of bills into Ferraro’s hand. “For my restaurant,” he explained. “You wouldn’t happen to have any squid, would you?”

Ferrero shook his head. “We sell those at home. Not many like them here.”

“Too bad. I serve calamari when I can.” The beefy man slung his sack of eels over his shoulder, elbowed himself away from Ferrero as rudely as he’d approached. Ferrero rubbed his chin and stuck the three hundred dinars in a pocket different from the one he used for the rest of the money he was making.

The eels went fast. Anything new for sale went fast in Rijeka; Croatia had never been a fortunate country. By the time all the fish were gone from the hold of the little boat, Ferrero and Bevacqua had made three times as much as they would have by selling them in Ancona.

“We’ll have to make many more trips here,” Bevacqua said enthusiastically, back in the fishing boat’s cramped cabin. “We’ll get rich.”

“Sounds good to me,” Ferrero said. He took out the wad of bills the fellow from the restaurant had given him. Stern and unsmiling, the face of Ante Pavelic, the first CroatianPoglavnik , glared at him from every twenty-dinar note he peeled off. Pavelic hadn’t invented fascism, but he’d done even more unpleasant things with it than the Germans, and his successors weren’t any nicer than he had been.

In the middle of the notes was a scrap of paper. On it was scrawled a note, in English:The Church of Our Lady of Lourdes. Tomorrow 1700. George Smith passed it to Peter Drinkwater, who read it, nodded, and tore it into very small pieces.

Still speaking Italian, Drinkwater said, “We ought to give thanks to Our Lady for blessing us with such a fine catch. Maybe she will reward us with another one.”

“She has a fine church here, I’ve heard,” Smith answered in the same tongue. The odds the customs men had planted ears aboard the boat were small, but neither of them believed in taking chances. The Germans made the best and most compact ears in the world, and shared them freely with their allies.

“May Our Lady let us catch the fish we seek,” Drinkwater said piously. He crossed himself. Smith automatically followed suit, as any real fisherman would have. If he ever wanted to see Sicily—or England—again, he had tobe a real fisherman, not just act like one.

Of course, Smith thought, if he’d really wanted to work toward living to a ripe old age, he would have been a carpenter like his father instead of going into Military Intelligence. But even a carpenter’s career would have been no guarantee of collecting a pension, not with Fascist Germany, the Soviet Union, the USA, and Britain all ready to throw sunbombs about like cricket balls. He sighed. No one was safe in today’s world—his own danger was merely a little more obvious than most.



Not counting Serbian slave laborers (and one oughtn’t to have counted them, as they seldom lasted long), Rijeka held about 150,000 people. The older part of the city was a mixture of medieval and Austro-Hungarian architecture; the city hall, a masterpiece of gingerbread, would not have looked out of place in old Vienna. The newer buildings, as was true from the Atlantic to the fascist half of the Ukraine, were in the style critics in free countries sneered at as Albert Speer Gothic: huge colonnades and great vertical masses, all intended to show the individual what an ant he was when set against the immense power of the State.

And in case the individual was too dense to note such symbolism, less subtle clues were available: anUstashi roadblock, where the secret police hauled drivers out of their Volkswagens and Fiats to check their papers; three or four GermanLuftwaffe troops, probably from the antiaircraft missile base in the hills above town, strolling along as if they owned the pavement. By the way the Croats scrambled out of their path, the locals were not inclined to argue possession of it.

Smith watched theLuftwaffe men out of the corner of his eye till they rounded a corner and disappeared. “Doesn’t seem fair, somehow,” he murmured in Italian to Drinkwater. Out in the open like this, he could be reasonably sure no one was listening to him.

“What’s that?” Drinkwater murmured back in the same language. Neither of them would risk the distinctive sound patterns of English, not here.

“If this poor, bloody world held any justice at all, the last war would have knocked out either the Nazis or the bloody Reds,” Smith answered. “Dealing with one set of devils would be bad enough; dealing with both sets, the way we have the last thirty-odd years, and it’s a miracle we haven’t all gone up in flames.”

“We still have the chance,” Drinkwater reminded him. “Remember Tokyo and Vladivostok.” A freighter from Russian-occupied Hokkaido had blown up in American-occupied Tokyo harbor in the early 1950s, and killed a couple of hundred thousand people. Three days later, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, the Russian port also suddenly ceased to be.

“Funny how it was Manstein who mediated,” Smith admitted. “Of course, Stalin’s dying when he did helped a bit, too, eh?”

“Just a bit,” Drinkwater said with a small chuckle. “Manstein would sooner have thrown bombs at the Russians himself, I expect, if he could have arranged for them not to throw any back.”

Both Englishmen shut up as they entered the square in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady. Like the Spanish fascists, the Croatians were ostentatiously pious, invoking God’s dominion over their citizens as well as that of the equally holy State. Any of the men and women heading for the Gothic cathedral ahead might have belonged to theUstashi ; it approached mathematical certainty that some of them did.

The exterior of the church reminded Smith of a layer cake, with courses of red brick alternating with snowy marble. A frieze of angels and a statue of the Virgin surmounted the door to the upper church. As Smith climbed the ornate stairway toward that door, he took off his cap. Beside him, Drinkwater followed suit. Above the door, golden letters spelled out za dom spremni—Ready for the Fatherland—the slogan of fascist Croatia.

Though Our Lady of Lourdes was of course a Catholic church, the angels on the ceiling overhead were long and thin, as if they sprang from the imagination of a Serbian Orthodox icon-painter. Smith tried to wipe that thought from his mind as he walked down the long hall toward the altar: even thinking of Serbs was dangerous here. The Croats dominated Serbia these days as ruthlessly as the Germans held Poland.

The pews of dark, polished wood, the brilliant stained glass, and the statue of the Virgin behind the altar were familiarly Catholic, and helped Smith forget what he needed to forget and remember what he needed to remember: that he was nothing but a fisherman, thanking the Lord for his fine catch. He took out a cheap plastic rosary and began telling the beads.

The large church was far from crowded. A few pews away from Smith and Drinkwater, a couple of Croatian soldiers in khaki prayed. An old man knelt in front of them; off to one side, aLuftwaffe lieutenant, more interested in architecture than spirituality, photographed a column’s acanthus capital. And an old woman with a broom and dustpan moved with arthritic slowness down each empty length of pew, sweeping up dust and scraps of paper.

The sweeper came up on Smith and Drinkwater. Obviously a creature of routine, she would have gone right through them had they not moved aside to let her by. “Thank you, thank you,” she wheezed, not caring whether she broke the flow of their devotions. A few minutes later, she bothered the pair of soldiers.

Smith looked down to the floor. At first he thought the sweeper simply incompetent, to go right past a fair-sized piece of paper. Then he realized that piece hadn’t been there before the old woman went by. Working his beads harder, he slid down into a genuflection. When he went back up into the pew, the paper was in his pocket.

He and Drinkwater prayed for another hour or so, then went back to their fishing boat. On the way, Drinkwater said, “Nothing’s simple, is it?”

“Did you expect it to be? This is Croatia, after all,” Smith answered. “The fellow who bought our eels likely hasn’t the slightest idea where the real meeting will be. It’s the God’s truth he’s better off not knowing, that’s for certain.”

“Too right there,” Drinkwater agreed. “And besides, if we were under suspicion, theUstashi likely would have come down on us in church. This way we run another set of risks for—” He broke off. Some names one did not say, not in Rijeka, not even if no one was close by to hear, not even in the middle of a sentence spoken in Italian.

Back at the boat, the two Englishmen went on volubly—and still in Italian—about how lovely the church of Our Lady of Lourdes had been: no telling who might be listening. As they talked, Smith pulled the paper from the church out of his pocket. The message was short and to the point:Trsat Castle, the mausoleum, night after tomorrow, 2200.

Themausoleum? Bloody melodrama,Smith thought. He passed the note to Drinkwater. His companion’s eyebrows rose as he read it. Then he nodded and ripped the paper to bits.

Both men went out on deck. Trsat Castle, or what was left of it after long years of neglect, loomed over Rijeka from the hills outside of town. By its looks, it was likelier to shelter vampires than the Serbian agent they were supposed to meet there. It was also unpleasantly close to theLuftwaffe base whose missiles protected the local factory district.

But the Serb had made his way across Croatia—no easy trick, that, not in a country whereShow me your papers was as common a greeting asHow are you today? —to contact British military intelligence. “Wouldn’t do to let the side down,” Smith said softly.

“No, I suppose not.” Drinkwater agreed, understanding him without difficulty. Then, of themselves, his eyes went back to Trsat Castle. His face was not one to show much of what he was feeling, but he seemed less than delighted at the turn the mission had taken. A moment later, his words confirmed that: “But this once, don’t you wish we could?”



Smith contrived to look carefree as he and Drinkwater hauled a wicker basket through the streets of Rijeka. The necks of several bottles of wine protruded from the basket. When he came up to a checkpoint, Smith took out a bottle and thrust it in a policeman’s face. “Here, you enjoy,” he said in his Italian-flavored Croatian.

“I am working,” the policeman answered, genuine regret in his voice. The men at the previous checkpoint hadn’t let that stop them. But this fellow, like them, gave the fishermen’s papers only a cursory glance and inspected their basket not at all. That was as well, for a Sten gun lurked in the straw under the bottles of wine.

Two more checkpoints and Smith and Drinkwater were up into the hills. The road became a dirt path. The Englishmen went off into a narrow meadow by the side of that path, took out a bottle, and passed it back and forth. Another bottle replaced it, and then a third. No distant watcher, assuming any such were about, could have noticed very little wine actually got drunk. After a while, the Englishmen lay down on the grass as if asleep.

Maybe Peter Drinkwater really did doze. Smith never asked him afterwards. He stayed awake the whole time himself. Through his eyelashes, he watched the meadow fade from green to gray to black. Day birds stopped singing. In a tree not far away, an owl hooted quietly, as if surprised to find itself awake. Smith would not have been surprised to hear the howl of a wolf—or, considering where he was, a werewolf.

Still moving as if asleep, Smith shifted to where he could see the glowing dial of his wristwatch. 2030, he saw. It was full dark. He sat up, dug in the basket, took out the tin tommy gun and clicked in a magazine. “Time to get moving,” he said, relishing the feel of English on his tongue.

“Right you are.” Drinkwater also sat, then rose and stretched. “Well, let’s be off.” Up ahead—and the operative word wasup —Trsat Castle loomed, a deeper blackness against the dark, moonless sky. It was less than two kilometers ahead, but two kilometers in rough country in the dark was nothing to sneeze at. Sweating and bruised and covered with brambles, Smith and Drinkwater got to the ruins just at the appointed hour.

Smith looked up and up at the gray stone towers. “In England, or any civilized country, come to that, a place like this would draw tourists by the bloody busload, you know?”

“But here it doesn’t serve the State, so they don’t bother keeping it up,” Drinkwater said, following his thought. He ran a sleeve over his forehead. “Well, no law to say we can’t take advantage of their stupidity.”

The way into the castle courtyard was open. Whatever gates had once let visitors in and out were gone, victims of some long-ago cannon. Inside . . . inside, George Smith stopped in his tracks and started laughing. Imagining the sort of mausoleum that would belong to a ruined Balkan castle, he had visualized something somber and Byzantine, with tiled domes and icons and the ghosts of monks.

What he found was very different: a neoclassical Doric temple, with marble columns and entablature gleaming whitely in the starlight. He climbed a few low, broad steps, stood and waited. Drinkwater came up beside him. In the judicious tones of an amateur archaeologist, he said, “I am of the opinion that this is not part of the original architectural plan.”

“Doesn’t seem so, does it?” Smith agreed. “It—”

In the inky shadows behind the colonnade, something stirred. Smith raised the muzzle of the Sten gun. A thin laugh came from the darkness. A voice followed: “I have had a bead on you since you came inside. But you must be my Englishmen, both because you are here at the time I set and because you chatter over the building. To theUstashi , this would never occur.”

Smith jumped at the scratch of a match. The brief flare of light that followed showed him a heavyset man of about fifty, with a deeply lined face, bushy eyebrows, and a pirate’s mustache. “I am Bogdan,” the man said in Croatian, though no doubt he thought of his tongue as Serbian. He took a deep drag on his cigarette; its red glow dimly showed his features once more. “I am the man you have come to see.”

“If you are Bogdan, you will want to buy our eels,” Drinkwater said in Italian.

“Eels make me sick to my stomach,” Bogdan answered in the same language. He laughed that thin laugh again, the laugh of a man who found few things really funny. “Now that the passwords are out of the way, to business. I can use this tongue, or German, or Russian, or even my own. My English, I fear, is poor, for which I apologize. I have had little time for formal education.”

That Smith believed. Like Poland, like the German Ukraine, Serbia remained a military occupation zone, with its people given hardly more consideration than cattle: perhaps less than cattle, for cattle were not hunted for the sport of it. Along with his Italian, Smith spoke fluent German and passable Russian, but he said, “This will do well enough. Tell us how it is with you, Bogdan.”

The partisan leader drew on his cigarette again, making his face briefly reappear. Then he shifted the smoke to the side of his mouth and spat between two columns. “That is how it goes for me, Englishman. That is how it goes for all Serbia. How are we to keep up the fight for freedom if we have no weapons?”

“You are having trouble getting supplies from the Soviets?” Drinkwater asked, his voice bland. Like most of the Balkans antifascists, Bogdan and his crew looked to Moscow for help before London or Washington. That he was here now—that the partisans had requested this meeting—was a measure of his distress.

He made a noise, deep in his throat. “Moscow has betrayed us again. It is their habit; it has been their habit since ’43.”

“Stalin betrayed us then, too,” Smith answered. “If the Russians hadn’t made their separate peace with Germany that summer, the invasion of Italy wouldn’t have been driven back into the sea, and Rommel wouldn’t have had the men to crush the Anglo-American lodgement in France.” Smith shook his head—so much treachery since then, on all sides. He went on, “Tell us how it is in Serbia these days.”

“You have what I need?” Bogdan demanded.

“Back at the boat,” Drinkwater said. “Grenades, cordite, blasting caps . . .”

Bogdan’s deep voice took on a purring note it had not held before. “Then we shall give the Germans and the Croat pigs who are their lackeys something new to think on when next they seek to play their games with us in our valleys. Let one of their columns come onto a bridge—and then let the bridge come down! I do not believe in hell, but I shall watch them burn here on earth, and make myself content with that. Have you also rockets to shoot their autogiros out of the air?”

Smith spread his hands regretfully. “No. Now that we are in contact with you, though, we may be able to manage a shipment—”

“It would be to your advantage if you did,” Bogdan said earnestly. “The Croats and Germans use Serbia as a live-fire training ground for their men, you know. They are better soldiers for having trained in actual combat. And that our people are slaughtered—who cares what happens to backwoods Balkans peasants, eh? Who speaks for us?”

“The democracies speak for you,” Smith said.

“Yes—to themselves.” Bogdan’s scorn was plain to hear. “Oh, they mention it to Berlin and Zagreb, but what are words? Wind! And all the while they go on trading with the men who seek to murder my nation. Listen, Englishmen, and I shall tell you how it is . . .”

The partisan leader did not really care whether Smith and Drinkwater listened. He talked, letting out the poison that had for so long festered inside him. His picture of Serbia reminded Smith of a fox’s-eye view of a hunt. The Englishmen marveled that the guerrilla movement still lived, close to two generations after theWehrmacht rolled down on what had been Yugoslavia. Only the rugged terrain of the interior and the indomitable ferocity of the people there kept resistance aflame.

“The Germans are better at war than the cursed Croats,” Bogdan said. “They are hard to trap, hard to trick. Even their raw troops, the ones who learn against us, have that combination of discipline and initiative which makes Germans generally so dangerous.”

Smith nodded. Even with Manstein’s leadership, fighting the Russians to a standstill had been a colossal achievement. Skirmishes along the borders of fascist Europe—and in such hunting preserves as Serbia—had let the German army keep its edge since the big war ended.

Bogdan went on, “When they catch us, they kill us. When we catch them, we kill them. This is as it should be.” He spoke with such matter-of-factness that Smith had no doubt he meant exactly what he said. He had lived with war for so long, it seemed the normal state of affairs to him.

Then the partisan’s voice changed. “The Germans are wolves. The Croats, their army and the stinkingUstashi , are jackals. They rape, they torture, they burn our Orthodox priests’ beards, they kill a man for having on his person anything written in the Cyrillic script, and in so doing they seek to turn us Serbs into their own foul kind.” Religion and alphabet divided Croats and Serbs, who spoke what was in essence the same language.

“Not only that, they are cowards.” By his tone, Bogdan could have spoken no harsher condemnation. “They come into a village only if they have a regiment at their backs, and either flee or massacre if anyone resists them. We could hurt them far worse than we do, but when they are truly stung, they run and hide behind the Germans’ skirts.”

“I gather you are coming to the point where that does not matter to you,” Smith said.

“You gather rightly,” Bogdan said. “Sometimes a man must hit back, come what may afterwards. To strike a blow at the fascists, I am willing to ally with the West. I would ally with Satan, did he offer himself as my comrade.”So much for his disbelief, Smith thought.

“Churchill once said that if the Germans invaded hell, he would say a good word for the devil,” Drinkwater observed.

“If the Germans invaded hell, Satan would need help because they are dangerous. If the Croatians invaded hell, he would have trouble tellingthem from his demons.”

Smith laughed dryly, then returned to business: “How shall we convey to you our various, ah, pyrotechnics?”

“The fellow who bought your eels will pay you a visit tomorrow. He has a Fiat, and has also a permit for travel to the edge of Serbia: one of his cousins owns an establishment in Belgrade. The cousin, that swine, is not one of us, but he gives our man the excuse he needs for taking his motorcar where we need it to go.”

“Very good. You seem to have thought of everything.” Smith turned away. “We shall await your man tomorrow.”

“Don’t go yet, my friends.” Agile as a chamois, Bogdan clattered down the steep steps of the mausoleum. He carried a Soviet automatic rifle on his back and held a squat bottle in his hands. “I have hereslivovitz . Let us drink to the deaths of fascists.” He yanked the cork out of the bottle with a loud pop.“Zhiveli!”

The harsh plum brandy burned its way down Smith’s throat like jellied gasoline. Coughing, he passed the bottle to Drinkwater, who took a cautious swig and gave it back to Bogdan. The partisan leader tilted it almost to the vertical. Smith marveled at the temper of his gullet, which had to be made of something like stainless steel to withstand the potent brew.

At last, Bogdan lowered theslivovitz bottle. “Ahh!” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “That is very fine. I—”

Without warning, a portable searchlight blazed into the courtyard from the open gateway into Trsat Castle. Smith froze, his eyes filling with tears at the sudden transformation from night to brighter than midday. An amplified voice roared, “Halt! Stand where you are! You are the prisoners of the Independent State of Croatia!”

Bogdan bellowed like a bull: “No fucking Croat will take me!” He grabbed for his rifle. Before the motion was well begun, a burst of fire cut him down. Smith and Drinkwater threw themselves flat, their hands over their heads.

Something hot and wet splashed Smith’s cheek. He rubbed the palm of his hand over it. In the actinic glare of the searchlight, Bogdan’s blood looked black. The partisan leader was still alive. Shrieks alternated with bubbling moans as he writhed on the ground, trying to hold his guts inside his belly.

Jackboots rattled in the courtyard as men from theUstashi , including a medic with a Red Cross armband, dashed in from the darkness. The medic grabbed Bogdan, stuck a plasma line in his arm. Bogdan did his best to tear it out again. A couple of ordinary troopers kept him from succeeding. “We’ll patch you up so you can sing for us,” one of them growled. His voice changed to gloating anticipation: “Then we’ll take you apart again, one centimeter at a time.”

A rifle muzzle pressed against Smith’s forehead. His eyes crossed as they looked down the barrel of the gun. “Up on your feet, spy,” said theUstashi man holding it. He had 7.92 millimeters of potent persuasion. Smith obeyed at once.

AnUstashi major strode into the brilliant hole the searchlight had cut in the darkness. He marched up to Smith and Drinkwater, who had also been ordered to his feet. Smith could have shaved on the creases in his uniform, and used his belt buckle as a mirror for the job. The perfect outfit served only to make him more acutely aware of how grubby he was himself.

The major studied him. The fellow had a face out of a fascist training film: hard, stern, handsome, ready to obey any order without question or even thought, not a gram of surplus fat anywhere. An interrogator with a face like his could make a prisoner afraid just by looking at him, and instilling fear was half an interrogator’s battle.

“You are the Englishmen?” the major demanded. He spoke English himself, with a better public-school accent than Smith could boast. Smith glanced toward Drinkwater. Warily, they both nodded.

Like a robot’s, the major’s arm shot up and out in a perfect fascist salute. “The fatherland thanks you for your help in capturing this enemy of the state and of the true faith,” he declared.

On the ground, Bogdan’s groans changed tone as he realized he had been betrayed. Smith shrugged. He had a fatherland, too—London told him what to do, and he did it. He said, “You’d best let us get out of the harbor before dawn, so none of Bogdan’s people can be sure we had anything to do with this.”

“It shall be as you say,” the major agreed, though he sounded indifferent as to whether Smith and Drinkwater gave themselves away to Bogdan’s organization. He probablywas indifferent; Croatia and England loved each other no better than Croatia and the Communists. This time, it had suited them to work together. Next time, they might try to kill each other. They all knew it.

Smith sighed. “It’s a rum world, and that’s a fact.”

TheUstashi major nodded. “So it is. Surely God did not intend us to cooperate with such degenerates as you. One day, though, we shall have a true reckoning.Za dom Spremni!

Fucking loony,Smith thought. If the major read that in his eyes, too bad. Croatia could not afford an incident with England, not when her German overlords were dickering with London over North Sea petroleum rights.

The trip down to Rijeka from Trsat Castle was worse than the one up from the city. The Englishmen dared not show a light, not unless they wanted to attract secret policemen who knew nothing of their arrangement with theUstashi major and who would start shooting before they got the chance to find out. Of course, they ran the same risk on (Smith devoutly hoped) a smaller scale, traveling in the dark.

Traveling in the dark down a steep hillside also brought other risks. After Peter Drinkwater fell for the third time, he got up swearing: “God damn the Russians for mucking about in Turkey, and in Iraq, and in Persia. If they weren’t trying to bugger the oil wells there, you and I wouldn’t have to deal with the likes of the bloodyUstashi —and we’d not have to feel we needed a bath afterwards.”

“No, we’d be dealing with the NKVD instead, selling out Ukrainian nationalists to Moscow,” Smith answered. “Would you feel any cleaner after that?”

“Not bloody likely,” Drinkwater answered at once. “It’s a rum world, all right.” He stumbled again, but caught himself. The path was nearly level now. Rijeka lay not far ahead.