Ludmila skinned back her teeth in a sardonic grin. “Oh, how the mighty Nazi general wished he could have sent a mighty Nazi flier to carry his message for him,” she said. “But he didn’t have any mighty Nazi fliers, so he was stuck with me.” The expression on Chill’s face had been that of a man biting into an unripe apple.

She patted the pocket of her fur-lined leather flying suit in which the precious despatch rested. She didn’t know what it said. By the way Chill had given it to her, that was a privilege she didn’t deserve. She laughed a little. As if he could have stopped her from opening the envelope and reading what was inside! Maybe he thought she wouldn’t think of that. If he did, he was stupid even for a German.

Perverse pride, though, had made her keep the envelope sealed. General Chill was-formally-an ally, and had entrusted her with the message, no matter how reluctant he was about it. She would observe the proprieties in return.

TheKukuruznik buzzed along toward Riga. The countryside over which it skimmed was nothing like the steppe that surrounded Kiev, where Ludmila had grown up. Instead of endless empty kilometers, she flew above snow-dappled pine woods, part of the great forest that stretched east to Pskov and far, far beyond. Here and there, farms and villages appeared in the midst of the forest. At first, the human settlements in the middle of the wilderness almost startled Ludmila. As she flew on toward the Baltic, they grew ever more frequent.

Their look changed about halfway to Riga, when she crossed from Russia into Latvia. It wasn’t just that the buildings changed, though plaster walls and tile roofs took the place of wood and sometimes thatch. Things became more orderly, too, and more conservative of space: all the land was used for some clearly defined purpose-cropland, town, woodlot, or whatever it might have been. Everything plainly was being exploited, not lying around waiting in case some use eventually developed for it.

“It might as well be Germany,” Ludmila said aloud. The thought gave her pause. Latvia had only been reincorporated into the Soviet Union a little more than a year before the Hitlerites treacherously invaded therodina. Reactionary elements there had welcomed the Nazis as liberators, and collaborated with them against Soviet forces. Reactionary elements in the Ukraine had done the same thing, but Ludmila tried not to think about that.

She wondered what sort of reception she’d get in Riga. Pskov had had Soviet partisans lurking in the nearby forests, and was now essentially a codominion between German and Soviet forces. She didn’t think any signflicant Soviet forces operated anywhere near Latvia-farther south, maybe, but not by the Baltic.

“So,” she said, “there soon will be a signflicant Soviet force in Latvia: me.” The slipstream blew away the joke, and the humor from it.

She found the Baltic coast and followed it south toward Riga. The sea had frozen some kilometers out from the shore. The sight made her shiver. Even for a Russian, that was a lot of ice. Smoke rose from Riga harbor. The Lizards had been pummeling harbors lately. When Ludmila approached the docks, she started drawing rifle fire. Shaking her fists at the idiots who took her biplane for a Lizard aircraft, she swung away and looked around for someplace to land theKukuruznik.

Not far from what looked like the main boulevard, she spied a park full of bare-branched trees. It had enough empty space-snow and dead, yellow-brown grass-and to spare for the biplane. No sooner had she slid to a jerky stop than German troops in field-gray and white came running up to her.

They saw the red stars on theKukuruznik’s wings and fuselage. “Who are you, you damned Russian, and what are you doing here?” one of them shouted.

A typically arrogant German, he assumed she spoke his language. As it happened, he was right this time. “Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, Red Air Force,” Ludmila answered in German. “I have with me a despatch for General Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt from General Chill in Pskov. Will you be so kind as to take me to him? And will you camouflage this aircraft so the Lizards cannot spot it?”

The Hitlerite soldiers drew back in surprise to hear her voice. She was sitting in the cockpit, and her leather flying helmet and thick winter gear had effectively disguised her sex. The German who’d spoken before leered now and said, “We’ve heard of pilots who call themselves Stalin’s Hawks. Are you one of Stalin’s Sparrows?”

Now he useddu rather thanSie. Ludmila wasn’t sure whether he intended the familiar intimacy or insult. Either way, she didn’t care for it. “Perhaps,” she answered in a voice colder than the weather, “but only if you’re one of Hitler’s Jackasses.”

She waited to see whether that would amuse or anger the German. She was in luck; not only did he laugh, he threw back his head and brayed like a donkey. “You have to be a jackass to end up in a godforsaken place like this,” he said. “All right,Kamerad-no, Kameradin- Senior Lieutenant, I’ll take you to headquarters. Why don’t you just come along with me?”

Several Germans ended up escorting her, maybe as guards, maybe because they didn’t want to leave her alone with the first one, maybe for the novelty of walking along with a woman while on duty. She did her best to ignore them; Riga interested her more.

Even after being battered by years of war, it didn’t look like a godforsaken place to her. The main street-Brivibas Street, it was called (her eyes and brain needed a little while to adjust to the Latin alphabet)-had more shops, and smarter-looking ones, than she’d seen in Kiev. The clothes civilians wore on the street were shabby and none too clean, but of better fabric and finer cut than would have been usual in Russia or the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Some of the people recognized her gear. In spite of her German escort, they yelled at her in accented Russian and in Latvian. She knew the Russian was insulting, and the Latvian sounded less than complimentary. To rub in the point, one of the Germans said, “They love you here in Riga.”

“There are plenty of places where they love Germans even more,” she said, which made the Nazi shut up with a snap. Had it been a chess game, she would have won the exchange.

TheRathaus where the German commandant had his headquarters was near the corner of Brivibas and Kaleiyu Streets. To Ludmila, the German-style building looked old as time. Like theKrom in Pskov, it had no sentries on the outside to give away its location to the Lizards. Once inside the ornately carved doors, though, Ludmila found herself inspected by two new and hostile Germans in cleaner, fresher uniforms than she was used to seeing.

“What do you have here?” one of them asked her escort.

“Russian flier. She says she has a despatch from Pskov for the commanding general,” the talky soldier answered. “I figured we’d bring her here and let you headquarters types sort things out.”

“She?” The sentry looked Ludmila over in a different way. “By God, it is a woman, isn’t it? Under all that junk she’s wearing, I couldn’t tell.”

He plainly assumed she spoke only Russian. She did her best to look down her nose at him, which wasn’t easy, since he was probably thirty centimeters the taller. In her best German, she said, “It will never matter to you one way or the other, I promise you that.”

The sentry stared at her. Her escorts, who’d been chatting with her enough to see her more or less as a human being-and who, like any real fighting men, had no great use for headquarters troops-suppressed their snickers not quite well enough. That made the sentry look even less happy. In a voice full of winter, he said, “Come with me. I will take you to the commandant’s adjutant.”

The adjutant was a beefy, red-faced fellow with a captain’s two pips on his shoulder straps. He said, “Give me this despatch, young lady.Generalleutnant Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt is a busy man. I shall convey to him your message as soon as it is convenient.”