Barbara peeled back the bedspread. The blankets underneath were the best thing about the room; there were lots of them and they were nice and thick. She clucked approvingly, opened her suitcase and took out a long cotton flannel nightgown. “We won’t have to sleep in all our clothes tonight,” she said. She reached up to her neck to pull off her sweater, then froze, her eyes on Sam.
“Do you want me to turn my back?” he asked, though every word hurt.
He watched her think about it. That hurt, too. But finally she shook her head. “No, never mind, don’t be silly,” she said. “I mean, we’re married, after all—kind of married, anyway.”
Kind of married, indeed, Yeager thought, and had another vision of swarming lawyers. He got out of his shirt and chinos while she was taking off the sweater and slacks. The flannel nightgown rustled as it slid down over her smooth skin. He liked to sleep with as few clothes as the weather would allow. Tonight, with all those heavy blankets, that meant socks and boxer shorts and undershirt. He dove under the covers in a hurry; the room itself was cold.
Barbara slipped in beside him. She blew out the candle on the night table. Darkness enfolded them; with the blinds closed and the curtains drawn, it was almost absolute. “Good night, honey,” he said, and without thinking, leaned over for a kiss. He got it, but her lips didn’t welcome his the way they had before.
He got back to his own side of the bed in a hurry. They lay together on the same mattress, but a Maginot Line might have sprung up between them. He sighed and wondered if he’d ever go to sleep. He tossed and turned and turned and tossed and felt Barbara doing the same, but they were both careful not to bump into each other. After some time that seemed forever but probably was before midnight, he drifted off.
He woke in the wee small hours, needing to use the chamber pot. Regardless of how he and Barbara had kept apart from each other awake, they’d come together in sleep, maybe for warmth, maybe for no real reason at all. Her nightgown had ridden up a lot; her bare thigh sprawled across his legs.
He cherished the feeling, wondering if he’d ever know it again, wondering if he was just sticking pins in himself for staying with her now when he didn’t think she’d end up picking him. But what the hell? He’d played umpteen seasons of ball, stubbornly hoping he’d catch a break. Why be different here?
And he did have to use the pot. He slid away as gently as he could, hoping not to wake her. But he did; the mattress shifted as her head came off the pillow. “Sorry, hon,” he whispered. “I need to get up for a second.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered back. “I have to do the same thing. Go ahead and go first.” She rolled over to her own side, but not, this time, as if she thought she’d get leprosy from touching him. He groped around by the bed, found the chamber pot, did what he had to do, and handed the pot to her.
The flannel nightgown rustled again as she hiked it up. She used the pot, too, then slid it out of the way and got back into bed. Yeager did, too. “Good night again,” he said.
“Good night, Sam.” To his surprise and delight, Barbara slid across to his side of the bed and gave him a hug. His arms slid around her, squeezed her to him. She was good to hang on to in the middle of the night. Too soon, though, she slipped away, and he knew that if he tried to hold her there, he was liable to lose her forever.
He tossed and turned for another long while before he went back to sleep. He wondered what that hug meant for his future, trying to read it the same way he’d tried to gauge managers’ oracular pronouncements in years gone by to see whether he was liable to get promoted or shipped down.
As with a lot of those pronouncements, he couldn’t figure out exactly what the hug foretold. He just knew he was gladder with it than he would have been without it. He also knew this mess wouldn’t unravel quickly, no matter what. More than the other, that thought calmed him and helped him fall asleep at last.
Heinrich Jäger set a hand on the stowage compartment that rode atop the track assembly of his Panther. The steel was warm against his palm—spring came to France more quickly than to Germany, and far more quickly than to the Soviet Union, where he’d waited out last winter.
The panzer crews stood by their machines, waiting for him to speak. Sunlight dappled down through trees in new leaf. With their black coveralls, the tankers looked like splotches of shadow. Their panzers were painted in what the camouflage experts called ambush pattern—red-brown and green splotches over ocher, and then smaller ocher patches over the red-brown and green. It was the best scheme the Wehrmacht had come up with for making its vehicles invisible from the air. Whether it was good enough—they were about to find out.
“Fuel pump aside,” Jäger said, giving his Panther an affectionate thwack, “this is the best human-made panzer in the world.” The crewmen of the Tigers attached to his unit glared at him, as he’d known they would. They liked their massive beasts’ 88mm gun better than the Panther’s 75, even if the Panther was more maneuverable and had its armor properly sloped.
“But,” Jäger went on, and let the word hang in the air, “if you try to fight the Lizards straight up with your machines, the only thing you’ll do is get yourselves killed. The Fatherland can’t afford that. Remember it. Think of yourselves as going up against T-34s in a Panzer II.”
That got their attention in the way he wanted. Next to one of the tough Soviet machines, a Panzer II, with its 20mm cannon and cardboard-thin protection, was a crew’s worth of “sad duty to inform you” letters waiting to happen. And yet, despite technical shortcomings, the Wehrmacht had advanced deep into Russia.
“We’ll try to hit them from ambush, then,” Jäger said. “We’ll lure them, put some of our panzers where we can get a shot at them from flank or rear. You all know how to do that; you’ve most of you done it on the Eastern Front.” He was glad he had picked crews here. Sending new fish against the Lizards would have been an invitation to slaughter. Casualties would be bad enough as things were.
“Their equipment will be better than ours,” he emphasized. “Their tactics and doctrine won’t. From what I saw in the Ukraine last year, they’re even more stereotyped than the Bolsheviks, but their equipment is so good, they’ll hurt you if you make any mistakes at all. In fact, they’ll hurt you even if you don’t make any mistakes. As tankers they’re nothing much, but if I had a chance to capture one of their panzers, I’d give up a lot to do it. Questions?”
“Will we have any air support?” one of the Tiger crewmen asked.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Jäger answered dryly. “Anything we put up, they knock down.” He thought about Ludmila Gorbunova in her little flying sewing machine. He hadn’t had any reply to the latest letter he’d posted. With the state of the mails these days, that meant nothing, but he worried all the same. Going into the air against the Lizards was more nearly suicidal than fighting them in panzers.
The same tanker asked, “We’ll see their helicopters, though, won’t we?”
“If you already know the answer, why ask the question?” Jäger said. “Yes, we probably will. If you hear one and it hasn’t spied you, get under tree cover as fast as you can. If a panzer in your squad blows up and you don’t think you’re in contact with the enemy, you’d better do the same. Anything else? No? Let’s go, then. Heil Hitler!”
“Heil Hitler!” the panzer crews chorused. They piled into their machines. Jäger tried to gauge their attitude. They weren’t confident of victory any more, the way they had been before the blows against the Poles or the French or the Russians. They all knew what the Lizards could do.
But no one hung back or hesitated. Better to hold the Lizards as far from the Fatherland as possible: they all knew that. Without much hope and without fear, they’d try to accomplish it.
Jäger climbed up onto the turret of his Panther, slid down inside through the open cupola. Beneath and behind him, the big Maybach engine thundered into life. He wished it were a diesel like the ones the Russians used; a petrol power plant didn’t jus
t burn when it got hit—it exploded.
“Down the road southwest,” he told the driver over the intercom. “We’re looking for good defensive positions, remember. We want to be in ambush before we run into the Lizards nosing north from Besançon.”
As seemed their habit since the blitzkrieg that followed their arrival on Earth, the Lizards were moving on Belfort slowly and methodically—with luck, even more slowly than they’d planned, because they had a way of overreacting to harassment fire from German infantry and French guerrillas. With more luck, Jäger’s panzer regiment—panzer combat group was a better name for it, given the mixed and mixed-up nature of his command—would slow them further. With a whole lot more luck, he might even stop them.
The Panther had a much smoother ride than the Panzer III in which he’d advanced into Russia. The interleaved road wheels had a lot to do with that. Not feeling as if his kidneys were shaking loose was a pleasant novelty. Now if the damned fuel pump wouldn’t keep breaking down …
In spite of the engine’s rumble and the rattle and squeak and grind of the treads, riding with his head and shoulders out of the cupola was pleasant on a bright spring day. New grass sprouted in meadows and in cracks in the macadam of the road. In a normal year, traffic would have smashed that latter hopeful growth flat, but the column of German panzers might have been the first motorized traffic the road had known in months. Here and there in the grass, wildflowers made bright splashes of red and yellow and blue. The air itself smelled green and growing.
To Jäger’s right, Klaus Meinecke sneezed sharply, once, twice, three times. The gunner pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his tunic, and let out a long, mournful honk. “I hate springtime,” he mumbled. His eyes were puffy and tracked with red. “Miserable hay fever kills me every year.”
Nothing makes everybody happy, Jäger thought. They ran through Montbéliard, where the big Peugeot works stood idle for want of fuel and raw materials, then followed the road that paralleled the Doubs River southwest toward Besançon—and toward the Lizards surely on the way up toward Belfort.
Jäger’s head swiveled up and down, back and forth, watching every moment for the airplane or helicopter that could turn his panzer into a funeral pyre. Meinecke chuckled. “You’ve got the deutsche Blick all right, Colonel,” he said.
“The German glance?” Jäger echoed, puzzled. “What’s that?”
“They recruited me for Panthers out of the Afrika Korps, not the Russian war,” the gunner explained. “It was a joke we made there, a takeoff on the deutsche Gruss, the German salute. We were always on the lookout for aircraft, first British, then from the Lizards. Spot one and it was time to find a hole in the ground.”
Before the Lizards came, Jäger had envied the tankers who fought in North Africa. The war against the British there was clean, gentlemanly—war as it should be, he thought. Both sides in Russia had fought as viciously as they could. Jäger thought of the massacres of Jews at Babi Yar and other places. A miracle the Polish Jews hadn’t killed him on his way back to Germany.
He didn’t care to brood on that too long; it made him wonder about what his country had been doing in the lands it had conquered. Instead he said, “So what was it like in the desert after the Lizards came?”
“Bad,” Meinecke answered. “We’d been beating the British, they were brave, but their panzers didn’t match up to ours, and their tactics were pretty bad. If we’d had proper supplies, we’d have mopped them up, but everything kept going to the Eastern Front.”
“We never had enough, either,” Jäger put in.
“Maybe not, Colonel, but a lot even of what was supposed to go to us ended up on the bottom of the Mediterranean. But you asked about the Lizards. They mopped up the Tommies and us both. They liked the desert, and we couldn’t hide from their planes there. Talk about the deutsche Blick—Gott in Himmel! The Tommies had it, too.”
“Misery loves company,” Jäger said. Then, still looking around, he suddenly called “Halt!” to the Panther’s driver.
The big battle tank slowed, stopped. Jäger stood tall in the cupola, waving the column to a halt behind him. He studied the little ridge that rose off to one side of the road. It was covered with old brush and saplings, and its crest could have been more than four hundred meters from the roadway. He’d have to scout out what lay behind, check his line of retreat—the one thing you couldn’t do was stand toe-to-toe with the Lizards, or before long you wouldn’t have any toes left.
He ordered the Panther up the rise to the crest. The longer he looked at the setup, the better he liked it. He didn’t think he’d come across a better defensive position, anyhow.
At his command, most of the German panzers deployed hull down on the reverse slope of the ridge line. He sent three or four Panzer IVs and a Tiger forward to meet the Lizards ahead of his main position and, with luck, bring them back all unsuspecting into the ambush he’d set up.
That left nothing to do but wait and stay alert. In back of the ridge lay a pond fed by a small stream. A fish leaped out of the water after a fly, fell back with a splash. Somewhere in his gear, Jäger had a couple of hooks and a length of light line. Pan-fried trout or pike sounded a lot better to him than the miserable rations he’d been eating.
A Frenchman in civilian clothes came out of the bushes on the far side of the pond. Jäger wasn’t surprised to see he had a rifle on his back. He waved to the Frenchman, who returned the gesture before stepping back into the undergrowth. Before the Lizards came, the French underground had nipped at the Germans who occupied their country. Now they worked together against the new invaders: in French eyes, the Germans were the lesser of two evils.
That’s something, anyhow, Jäger thought. In Poland, the Lizards had seemed the lesser of two evils to the Jews. From what he’d learned, he couldn’t blame them for feeling that way.
A couple of times, he’d tried talking with officers he trusted about what Germany had done in the east. It hadn’t worked: he’d been met by a refusal to listen that almost amounted to saying, I don’t want to know. He hadn’t brought up the subject now for some time.
Away in the distance, he heard the harsh, abrupt bark of a panzer cannon. At the same time, a shout sounded in his earphones: “Engaging lead element of enemy panzer column! Will attempt to carry out plan as outlined. Will—” The transmission cut off abruptly; Jäger feared he knew why.
More booms: from the Panzer IV’s 75mm guns; heavier, deeper ones from the Tiger’s 88; and, sharp as thunderclaps, from the Lizards’ cannon. Then another sort of roar, lower and more diffuse, with smaller blasts and cheery pop-pops all mixed in with it That was the sound of a panzer brewing up.
“Armor-piercing,” Jäger said quietly. The loader slammed a black-nosed shell into the breech of the cannon. Out of sight down the road, another panzer exploded. Jäger bit his lip; those were men, comrades-in-arms, dying nastily. And, the officer part of him whispered, if all my panzers get killed before any make it back here, what good is my ambush? He was inured to sacrificing men; throwing them away was something else again.
He stood up in the cupola, made a hand sign: be ready. Panzer commanders passed it down the line. He didn’t want to use radio, not now. The Lizards were too good at picking up their foes’ signals. As if from very far away, he felt his heart thudding in his chest, his bowels loosening. That was what fear did to your body. It didn’t have to rule you if you didn’t let it.
Up the road, motor going flat out, men inside probably shaken to blood pudding, raced a Panzer IV. It sounded like an explosion in a smithy, roaring and clattering and clanking as if it were about to fall to pieces.
Behind it, almost silent by comparison, glided a Lizard panzer, then another and another and another. Jäger knew they were toying with the Panzer IV. They had a way of stabilizing their guns so they shot accurately even on the move, but they were enjoying the chase for a while before they ended it.
Let’s see how they enjoy this, he thought, and yelled, �
��Fire!”
Because his head was outside the cupola, the bellow of the cannon half stunned him. Flame and smoke spurted from the gun’s muzzle. “Hit!” he cried in delight. It was a solid hit, too, right at the join between the turret and body of the Lizard panzer. The turret tilted, almost torn out of its ring; Jäger wouldn’t have wanted to be inside when that 6.8-kilo round came knocking.
But the Lizards made their panzers tough. That shell would have torn the turret right off a British tank or a Soviet T-34, and turned either of them into an inferno on the instant. Not only did this one not catch fire, its driver threw it into reverse and did his best to escape the trap in which he found himself. “Hit him again!” Jäger shouted. His gunner required no urging—the second shot punctuated Jäger’s sentence.
All the rest of the hull-down German panzers along the ridge line opened up, too. The Lizards offered them a target tankers dream about: the less heavily armored flanks and engine compartments of their vehicles. One of those vehicles brewed up in a flash of orange and blue flame—somebody’s round had penetrated to something vital. Jäger wondered if that had been a Panther’s kill or a Tiger’s: the heavier panzer’s 88 fired a correspondingly more massive shell, but the Panther’s gun had a higher muzzle velocity and would pierce just as much armor, maybe more.
The Lizards did not react well to being taken in flank. Jäger had counted on that: they were even more vulnerable to the unexpected than Soviet troops. For a crucial few seconds, they either tried to back out of trouble like the panzer Jäger had hit or traversed their turrets toward the concealed German armor without shifting the tanks themselves. That let the Germans keep pounding away at their more vulnerable sides and rears. Another Lizard panzer turned into a fireball, then another.
But the Lizards did not stay stupid forever. One by one, they turned toward the Germans’ fire. No German panzer gun could beat their front glacis plates. Jäger’s gunner tried. His shell buried itself almost to the drive bands, but did no damage anyone could find.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 95
