“Sure, Sam,” Oscar answered. Even without his rifle, Yeager would have bet on him against Ristin and Ullhass both; dark and quiet he might be, but he’d seen nasty action somewhere—he had the look. Now he nodded to Barbara. “Morning, ma’am.”
“Good morning, Oscar,” she answered. She spoke more precisely than Sam did. Hell, she spoke more precisely than most people did. She’d been a graduate student in medieval English out at Berkeley before the war; that was where she’d met Jens.
Oscar turned back to Sam. “Go on in. General Groves, he’s expecting you.”
“Okay, thanks.” Yeager turned the doorknob, feeling the same willies he’d had whenever a manager called to him in a certain tone of voice after a game. Oh, God, he thought. Where have they gone and traded me to now?
He went through the door, closed it after him. General Groves looked up from the notes he was scribbling on a typed report. Sam came to attention and saluted. “Sergeant Samuel Yeager reporting as ordered, sir,” he said formally.
“At ease, Yeager. You’re not in trouble,” Groves said, returning the salute. He waved to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit down if you care to.” When Sam had, Groves went on, “Is it your opinion that we’ve wrung just about everything your two scaly accomplices know about nuclear physics out of them?”
“Yes, sir, I’d say that’s probably true,” Yeager answered after a moment’s thought.
“Good. I’d have thrown you out of here on your ear if you’d tried to tell me anything else,” Groves said. By the way the muscles shifted in his big shoulders, he’d meant it literally. “The United States can still learn a lot about the Lizards from Ullhass and Ristin, though, even if what we learn has nothing directly to do with the Metallurgical Laboratory. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”
“No doubt about it, sir,” Yeager said. “The more we know about the Lizards, the better. They’ll still be around from now on even if we manage to beat them, and that’s not counting this colonization fleet of theirs. It’s due in—what?—twenty years?”
“That’s about right, yes.” General Groves looked intently across the desk at Sam. “The way you answered that last question convinced me these are absolutely the right orders for you: you casually came to the same conclusion a staff of government experts has needed months to reach.”
Probably comes from reading science fiction, Yeager thought. He didn’t say that out loud; he had no idea how Groves felt about that Buck Rogers stuff. He did say, “You haven’t told me what the orders are, sir.”
“So I haven’t.” Groves glanced down at some papers behind his IN basket that Yeager couldn’t see. “We’ve established a center for interrogation and research on Lizard POWs down in Arkansas. I’m going to send Ristin and Ullhass there, and I’m ordering you to accompany them. I think you can best serve your country by using your rapport with the Lizards, and that’s the place for you to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. He’d been traded, all right, but to a place he didn’t mind going . . . assuming he could get there. “Uh, sir, what sort of transportation will we have? There’s a lot of Lizards between here and Arkansas that aren’t prisoners, if you know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean. Nevertheless, you’ll fly,” Groves answered.
“Sir?” Yeager did his best to keep the surprise—to say nothing of the dismay—he felt from showing. His best, he feared, was none too good. He figured he’d better explain: “They shoot down an awful lot of our planes, sir.” That would do for an understatement until a better one came along. The Lizards’ aircraft had the same sort of advantage against the planes the Americans flew as a Lightning or a Warhawk would have against a World War I-vintage Sopwith Camel.
But Groves nodded his big head and said, “You’ll fly anyhow—and what’s more, the Lizards will know you’re coming.” Yeager must have looked as if he’d just been smacked in the kisser with a large carp, for the general chuckled a little before continuing, “We always inform them before we move prisoners by air, and we paint the planes we fly them in bright yellow. It’s worked pretty well; they don’t like shooting at their own people any more than we would.”
“Oh,” Yeager said. “I guess that’s okay, then.” And if there were no such arrangement between Lizards and men and Groves had told him to fly anyway, he’d have damn well flown: that’s what the Army was about. As it was, though, he asked, “Do you think it’s safe enough for my wife to come along, sir? Really, I’m not just asking for the sake of having her with me; she knows just about as much about the Lizards as I do. She’d be useful at this Arkansas place, at least until she has her baby.”
“Under normal circumstances, Sergeant, I’d say no,” Groves answered. He grimaced. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as normal circumstances any more. As you say, your Barbara may be useful in Arkansas, but that’s not why I’m going to tell you yes. Frankly, Sergeant, getting you and her out of here will simplify matters when Professor Larssen gets back from Washington State.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said woodenly. Groves had to think like that, though; Jens Larssen was a talented nuclear physicist, and the general was running a project to build an atomic bomb. If he could help the Lizard prisoner research project at the same time . . . two birds with one stone ran through Yeager’s mind. “When do we leave, sir?” he asked.
“Not for a few days,” Groves answered. “We need to make the arrangements and be sure they’re understood. Written orders will go out to you as soon as one of the secretaries gets around to typing them. Dismissed.”
Yeager stood, saluted, and left. He wasn’t sure Groves even saw the salute; he’d already gotten back to work on the report he’d been scribbling on when Sam came in.
Barbara, Ullhass, and Ristin all took a couple of steps toward him when he came out into the hallway. “You look green, Sam,” she said. “What happened in there?”
“Pack your bags, hon,” he answered. “We’re moving to Arkansas.” She stared and stared. He had to remind himself that she’d never been traded before.
Heinrich Jäger stuck his head and torso up through the open cupola of his Panzer V for a look around, then ducked back down into the turret of the panzer. “Lord, it feels good to have some centimeters of steel all the way around me again,” he said.
His gunner, a veteran sergeant named Klaus Meinecke, grunted at that. “Colonel, you don’t seem to have done too bad while you were out on your own, either.” He pointed to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross that Jäger wore at his collar.
Jäger’s hand went to the medal. He’d earned it for helping Otto Skorzeny take the town of Split on the Adriatic back from the Lizards. He said, “Sergeant, I was in the infantry during the last war. I thought one round of that had cured me forever. Just goes to show, you may get older, but you don’t get smarter.”
Meinecke laughed as if he’d told a joke. But Jäger meant every word of it. Fighting from building to building inside the great stone walls of Diocletian’s palace had been every bit as appalling as trench warfare in France a quarter of a century before.
The Alsatian town of Rouffach, through which the Panther had rumbled a few minutes before, had been part of the German Reich during World War I, taken from France after the Franco-Prussian War. France had taken it back after the First World War; now it was German again . . . for as long as the Reich could maintain itself against the Lizards.
Jäger stood up in the cupola again, looked back over his shoulder. The spires of Rouffach’s church of Notre Dame still loomed against the sky; so did what the locals called the Witches’ Tower, crowned by a huge, disorderly storks’ nest. “Pretty country,” he said, lowering himself once more.
Klaus Meinecke grunted. “I wouldn’t know. All I get to see of it is a gunsight’s worth, except when we stop for the night.” He smacked his lips. “They make good wine around here, though; I’ll give them that much.”
“That they do,” Jäger said. “They didn’t do badly farther s
outh, either.”
He wouldn’t let himself venture any more in the way of reproach than that. When he’d left the panzer forces in the west to head for Croatia, they’d had the Lizards stopped in their tracks between Besançon and Belfort. Since then, Belfort had fallen, and Mulhouse, too; the Lizards had pushed all the way up to the Rhine. If I’d been here . . . Jäger thought, and then shook his head. Almost certainly, the same thing would have happened. He knew he was a damn fine panzer officer. He also knew he wasn’t a panzer genius—and even a panzer genius might not have held the Lizards once they got rolling.
“Maybe we can push them out of Mulhouse again,” he said hopefully.
“That’s what they said we’d do back in Colmar, anyhow,” Meinecke answered. He was a veteran, all right; he understood that what they said and what actually happened could be two very different animals. He pursed his lips, then added quietly, as if afraid of being overheard by malignant fate, “Engine’s been behaving pretty well, knock wood.” He made a fist and tapped it against the side of his own head.
“Let’s hope it keeps up,” Jäger agreed. Rushed into production, the Panther could be balky; among other things, fuel pump problems plagued it. But it was a great step forward from earlier German panzers, boasting a high-velocity 75mm gun and thick, well-sloped armor borrowed in concept from that of the Soviet T-34.
All of which meant you only had to be foolhardy to go up against the Lizards in a Panther, as opposed to clinically insane, which was about what opposing them in a Panzer III had required.
“Wish we had one of those bombs the Russians used to blow the Lizards to hell and gone,” Meinecke said. “When do you suppose we’ll get one of our own?”
“Damned if I know,” Jäger said. “I wish to God I did.”
“If you don’t, who does?” the gunner asked.
Now Jäger just grunted by way of reply. He wasn’t supposed to say anything about that to anybody. He’d been part of the band of raiders that had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in Russia—like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods, said the part of him that, back before World War I, had planned on becoming a classical archaeologist. He’d taken Germany’s share of the material across Poland on horseback, only to have half of it hijacked by Jewish fighters there.
Only luck they didn’t kill me and take it all, he thought. In Russia and then in Poland, he’d learned what the Reich had done to the Jews who’d fallen into their hands; it made him sick, so he understood why the Polish Jews had risen in favor of the Lizards and against their German overlords.
He’d also been involved in the German physicists’ efforts to build an atomic pile at Hechingen, although, again luckily, he’d been in combat in eastern France when the pile went out of control somehow and killed off a good many physicists, including Werner Heisenberg. How long the program would take to recover was anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, the unglamorous infantry and panzer troops would have to keep the Lizards from overrunning the Vaterland. If they didn’t, the high foreheads would never get the chance to finish their research and make something that would go boom! In Hechingen, Jäger had felt useless; he’d been too ignorant to contribute properly. Now he was back to doing what he did best.
Off to one side of the road, an artillery piece barked, then another and another. “Eighty-eights,” Jäger said, identifying them by the report. “That’s good.”
Meinecke understood him without any more discussion than that: “So they can fire their salvo and then get the hell out of there, you mean?”
“Right the first time, Sergeant. They’re easy to shift to a new firing position—a lot easier than the bigger guns.” Jäger paused meditatively. “And Lizard counterbattery fire is better than anything we ever dreamt of.”
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, sir?” Meinecke agreed with a mournful sigh. “They can drive nails into your coffin from halfway round the world, seems like sometimes. If there were more of them, and if they had the doctrine to go with all their fancy equipment—”
“—The likes of us would have been dead for quite a while now,” Jäger finished for him. Meinecke laughed, though again the colonel had spoken nothing but the truth. Down lower in the turret, Wolfgang Eschenbach, the loader, laughed, too. He was a big blond farm boy; getting more than half a dozen words out of him in the course of a day was just this side of miraculous.
For all their good points, 88s had drawbacks, too. They couldn’t fire shells as heavy as the larger guns, and they couldn’t throw the shells they did fire as far. That meant—
“We’ll probably see action in the next few kilometers,” Jäger said.
“Bumping up against whatever the artillery boys are shooting at, you mean, sir?” Meinecke said. At Jäger’s nod, he went on, “Makes sense to me. Besides, south of Rouffach is where they told us we’d start running into the enemy, isn’t it? They have to be right once in a while.”
“Your confidence in the High Command does you credit, Sergeant,” Jäger said dryly, which set the gunner and the loader to laughing again. “I just hope the Lizards use the same kind of flank guards we did when we got stretched thin fighting the Russians.”
“How’s that, Herr Oberst?” Meinecke asked. “Me, I was playing games with the Tommies in the desert before they stuck me in the Flying Circus here.” When Panther and Tiger panzers started rolling off the assembly lines, the Wehrmacht put only the best crewmen into them.
“You, you didn’t miss a thing,” Jäger said, mimicking his gunner’s diction. “But sometimes we’d have to concentrate our German troops at the Schwerpunkt, the decisive place, and cover our flanks with Romanians or Hungarians or Italians.”
“God save us.” Wolfgang Eschenbach used up half his daily quota of speech.
“They weren’t the worst soldiers I’ve ever seen,” Jäger said. “They might not have been bad at all if they were decently equipped. But sometimes the Russians managed to hit them instead of us, and it got pretty ugly. I’m hoping the Lizards are concentrating all their best troops up where they’re trying to advance. I’d just as soon not have to fight the first team all the time.”
“Amen to that,” Eschenbach said; Jäger confidently expected him to fall silent till the morning.
The colonel stood up in the cupola again. That was a good way to get shot, but it was also far and away the best way to see what was going on, and if you didn’t know what was going on, you had no business commanding a panzer, let alone a (rather battered) regiment of them. Slamming the lid down and peering through the periscopes made you feel safer, but it also made you miss things that were liable to get you killed.
Northbound shells whistled overhead, undoubtedly the Lizards’ response to the Germans’ 88s. Jäger hoped the artillerymen had moved their pieces elsewhere before the shells came down on them.
The countryside began to have the look of a land at war: wrecked and burned farm buildings, smashed trees, bloated dead animals, shell craters pocking fields. Jäger clucked sadly at the charred wreck of a German half-track. The Panther rolled past trenches and foxholes that showed the earlier limits of the German push to the south.
Stooping to get down into the turret for a moment, Jäger said, “We’re moving forward, anyhow.” Against the Lizards, that was no small novelty, and boosted his hopes that they had only second-line troops on their flanks. Like a jack-in-the-box, he popped up out of the cupola again.
Through the rasping roar of the Panther’s big Maybach engine came the rattle of small-arms fire ahead. A couple of German MG42s were in action, their rapid rate of fire unmistakable—they sounded as if a giant were ripping enormous bolts of thick, tough cloth between his hands. Jäger was glad the German infantry had the machine guns; since all Lizard foot soldiers carried automatic weapons, the poor Landsers needed all the help they could get.
The German panzers deployed for action, moving into their blunt wedge formation: two companies forward, Jäger’s command panzer and another company in th
e middle to support them, and a fourth company in the rear as a reserve. They chewed brown, muddy lines through the green of growing crops.
Without warning, a streak of fire lanced through the air toward a Panzer IV in one of the lead companies. New Panzer IVs had long-barreled 75mm guns almost as good as the ones Panthers carried, but their armor, though thicker than in the earlier models, wasn’t excellent protection even against terrestrial foes. Against a Lizard anti-panzer rocket, the armor might as well not have been there at all. The Panzer IV brewed up, orange flame billowing and a column of thick black smoke mounting swiftly into the air.
Confused, angry shouts filled the radio. Jäger grabbed the headset, shoved the earphones into place, and shouted orders into the microphone. The nearest surviving panzer poured machine-gun fire into the thick clump of bushes from which the anti-panzer rocket had come, hoping to flush out or knock down the Lizards who had fired it.
Nothing without armor could have survived that hail of bullets. From more than four hundred meters farther to the rear, Jäger watched the bushes writhe under it, as if under torture. But a moment later, another rocket incinerated a German panzer.
“They’ve got one of their troop carriers in there!” Jäger shouted into the microphone. “Give ’em your main armament.” Unlike German half-tracks, the Lizards’ armored troop carriers bore light cannon that could chew up anything this side of a panzer, and carried those rockets on turret rails to either side of the cannon. With them, the troop carriers became deadly dangerous panzer killers.
But, while they were formidably armed, they were only lightly armored. They could withstand small-arms fire, but when a panzer shell came knocking, they opened up. The German panzer hit the brakes to fire into that stand of bushes. Moments later, the bushes went up in flames as part of the troop carrier’s funeral pyre.
Upsetting the Balance Page 4
