“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” Colonel Hexham snapped.
‘We’ll all go back to the University of Denver and find out just precisely what-if anything-General Groves told Professor Larssen to do. Come on!” He made as if to start riding again.
“Uh, sir-” Oscar began, and then shut up. A sergeant had no way to tell a colonel he was being a damn fool.
“Come on!” Hexham growled again, this time staring straight at Jens. “We’ll get to the bottom of this malingering, damn me to hell if we don’t. Get moving!”
Jens got moving. At first he seemed to be watching himself from outside. He unslung the Springfield, flipping off the safety as he did so. He always carried a round in the chamber. But as the rifle came up to his shoulder, he was back inside his own head, calculating as abstractly as if he were working on a problem of atomic decay.
Tactics… Oscar was the more dangerous foe-not only was he closer to Jens, he was a real fighting man, not a pouter pigeon in a uniform. Jens shot him in the face. Oscar never knew what hit him. He flew off the bike saddle, the back of his head exploding in red ruin.
Jens worked the bolt. The expended cartridge jingled cheerily when it hit the asphalt Colonel Hexham’s eyes and mouth were open as wide as they could be. “Good-bye, Colonel,” Jens said sweetly, and shot him in the head, too.
The clank of the second cartridge on the roadway brought Jens back to himself. He felt exalted, as if he’d just got laid. He even had a hard-on. But two bodies sprawled in spreading pools of blood would take some explaining he couldn’t give, no matter how much both the stinking bastards had it coming.
“Can’t go back to BOQ, not now, nosiree,” Jens said. He often talked to himself when he was alone on the road, and he sure as hell was alone now. He’d made certain-dead certain-of that.
Couldn’t go to BOQ. Couldn’t go back to the pile, either. Okay, what did that leave? For a second, he didn’t think it left anything. But that was just a last bit of reluctance to face what had been in the back of his mind for a long time. Humanity didn’t have any use for him any more. People had been rubbing his nose in that ever since Barbara let him know she’d been spreading her legs for the lousy ballplayer she’d found. They didn’t need him in Denver. They wouldn’t listen to his plans, they’d gone ahead and built a bomb-built a couple of bombs-without him.
Well, to hell with humanity, then. The Lizards would care to hear what he had to tell them. Yes, sir, they sure would (dim memories of Thornton Burgess stories floated up in his mind from childhood). They’d know how to reward him properly for telling them, too. But he wouldn’t be doing it for the reward. Oh, no. Getting his own back was a lot more important.
He carefully put the safety back on, slung the Springfield over his shoulder, and headed east. The sentries at the entrance of Lowry Field just nodded to him as he rolled past. They hadn’t heard the rifle shots. He’d worried a little about that.
A map unrolled in his mind. They’d find the bodies. They’d chase him. If they understood he was heading east toward the Lizards, they’d probably figure he’d go east on US 36. That was the straight route, the route a crazy man who wasn’t hitting on all cylinders would take.
But he wasn’t crazy, not even slightly. Not him. He had US 6 and US 34 north of US 36, and US 24 and US 40 south of it, plus all the little back roads between the highways. Before long, he’d pick one. Somewhere not far from the Colorado-Kansas border, he’d find the Lizards. He bent his back and pedaled harder. It was all downhill from here.
“Yes, sir,” Mutt Daniels said. The way he said it told what he thought of the order. Cautiously, he added, “We been doin’ a lot of retreating lately, ain’t we, sir?”
“So we have.” Captain Szymanski also looked sour about it.
Seeing that, Mutt pushed a little harder: “Seems like we ain’t needed to do most of it, neither, not from the way the fightin’ went beforehand. And this latest, this here, is just a skedaddle, nothin’ else but. Sir.”
His company commander shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t do anything about it no matter what he thought “Major Renfree and I have been screaming to the colonel, and he’s been screaming to the high command. There’s nothing he can do to get the orders changed. From what he says, they came right from the top, from General Marshall himself. You want to call up FDR, Lieutenant?”
“It would take somethin’ like that, wouldn’t it?” Daniels sighed. “Okay, sir, I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I’ll just shut my damnfool mouth and do like I’m told. Anybody’d think I was in the Army or some damn thing like that”
Szymanski laughed. “I’m glad you are in the Army, Mutt You keep everybody around you all nice and loosey-goosey.”
“I’mnot glad I’m in the Army, meanin’ no offense to you, sir,” Mutt said. “I done my bit in the last war. Only reason they need old farts like me is on account of the Lizards. Wasn’t for them bastards, I’d be lookin’ ahead to spring training, not tryin’ to figure out how to pull my men back without lookin’ too much like I’m doin’ it.”
“We’ve got to do it,” Captain Szymanski answered. “I don’t know why, but we do. And if that’s not the Army for you, what the devil is?”
“Yes, sir.” If Mutt laid down the bunt sign, the fellow at the plate had to try and bunt, whether he liked Mutt’s strategy or not. Now it was his turn to do something he really hated because the higher-ups thought it was a smart move.They better be right, he thought as he climbed to his feet.
Sergeant Muldoon looked anything but happy when he brought the news from on high. “Jeez, Lieutenant, they’re sandbaggin’ so hard, they could build a wall around these damn Lizards with all the sand,” he said. “We should be kickin’ their ass instead o’ letting them push us around.”
“You know it, I know it, the captain knows it, the colonel knows it, but General Marshall, he don’t know it, and he counts for more’n the rest of us put together,” Daniels answered. “I just wish I was sure he had some kind of notion of what he was up to, that’s all. What’s that they say about ‘Ours is not to wonder why’?”
“The other part of it goes something like, ‘Ours is to let the bastards kill us even when they don’t have a clue,’ ” Herman Muldoon said. He was cynical enough to make a sergeant, all right. And, like any decent sergeant, he knew fighting city hall didn’t pay. “Okay, Lieutenant, how we gonna make this work?”
Mutt let stories from his grandfathers give him the clues he needed to do the job right. He thinned his main line down to what either granddad would have called a line of skirmishers, then to nothing but pickets. To disguise that as best he could, he made sure the pickets had automatic weapons and both the bazooka launchers in the platoon.
To try to hold back Lizard armor, the brass also had a lot of tanks and antitank guns well forward. Mutt didn’t quite follow that: it was as if they wanted the Lizards to go forward, all right, but not too far or too fast. He hoped the big picture made sense, because the little one sure as hell didn’t.
His men had the same feeling. Retreat was hard on an army; you felt as if you were beaten, regardless of whether you really were. The troops didn’t look ready to bug out, but they didn’t act like men with their peckers up, either. If they had to fight and hold ground, he wasn’t sure they could do it.
Not that much of Chicago looked like ground worth holding, anyhow. As far as that went, one stretch of rubble was pretty much like another. Even tanks had a rough time making their way through piles of brick and stone and craters big enough to swallow them whole.
He was taken by surprise when he came upon one stretch of halfway decent road as his unit trudged north. “You can go that way if you want to,” an MP doing traffic control said, “but it makes you easier for the Lizards to spot from the air.”
“Then what the hell did anybody build it for?” Mutt asked. The MP didn’t answer. Odds were, the MP couldn’t answer because he didn’t know. Maybe nobody knew. Maybe the Army had cleared the ro
ad just so people walking along it could get killed in carload lots. Mutt was past the stage where anything had to make sense.
Not far from the southern end of the road, he watched a team of soldiers busily repairing a house. They weren’t repairing it to look like new, they were repairing it to look like the wreckage all around it. It looked as if they’d knocked down the whole side nearest the road. Inside was a wooden crate big enough to make a pretty good Hooverville shack. In a little while, though, you wouldn’t be able to see it because the soldiers would have restored the wall they’d knocked down. By the time they were done, the place would look as ugly as it had before they started.
“Ain’t that a hell of a thing?” Muldoon jerked his thumb at the soldiers. “Are we fighting the Lizards or are we building houses for ’em?”
“Don’t ask me,” Daniels answered. “I gave up a long time ago, tryin’ to figure out what’s goin’ on.”
“They ain’t gonna stay there and try and hold on to that box, are they?” Muldoon asked. The question wasn’t aimed particularly at Mutt, who didn’t have any answers, but at whoever in the world might know. Muldoon spat in the mud. “Sometimes I think everybody’s gone crazy but me, you know?” He gave Daniels a sidelong look. “Me and maybe you, too, Lieutenant. It ain’t like it’s your fault.” From Muldoon, that was a compliment, and Mutt knew it.
He thought about what the sergeant had said. He also thought about the way the brass was running the fight here in Chicago. If they’d just kept at what they were doing, they could have pushed the Lizards back to the South Side, maybe even out of Chicago altogether. Oh, yeah, it would have cost, but Mutt had been through the trenches in the First World War. He knew you had to pay the price if you wanted to gain ground.
But instead, they were pulling back Mutt turned to Muldoon. “You’re right. They must be crazy. It’s the only thing that makes any sense a-tall.” Solemnly, Muldoon nodded.
Heinrich Jager slammed his fist down on the cupola as his Panther rumbled out of Oels, heading west toward Breslau. He was wearing gloves. Otherwise his skin would have peeled off when it hit the frozen metal of the panzer. He wasn’t crazy-no, not he. About his superiors, he had considerable doubts.
So did Gunther Grillparzer. The gunner said, “Sir, what the devil’s the point of pulling out of Oels now, after we’ve spent the last three days fighting over it as if it were Breslau itself?”
“If I knew, I would tell you,” Jager answered. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.” Not only had theWehrmacht done a good job of fortifying Oels as part of the outer ring of Breslau’s defensive system, the fourteenth-century castle up on the hill made a first-class artillery observation post. And now they were abandoning the town, the castle (or what was left of it), and the works the engineers had made, just letting the Lizards take them while the panzers pulled back closer to Breslau.
Artillery shells whistled overhead, plowing up the frozen ground between the retreating panzers and Oels, as if to tell the Lizards,thus far and no farther. Jager wondered if the Lizards would listen. They were hitting hard in this latest onslaught, probably fighting better than they had since the days when they first came to Earth and swept everything before them.
His Panther had two narrow rings and one wide one painted on the cannon, just behind the muzzle brake: two armored personnel carriers and one panzer. The Lizards were still tactically sloppy; they didn’t watch their flanks as well as they should, and they walked into ambushes even Russians would have seen. Half the time, though, they fought their way out of the ambushes, too, not because they were great soldiers but because their panzers and rockets broke the trap from the inside out. As always, they’d inflicted far more damage than they suffered.
Even now, Lizard artillery shells fell around the panzers as they withdrew. Jager feared them almost as much as he feared the Lizards’ panzers. They spat little mines all over the bloody place; if your panzer ran over one of those, it would blow a track right off, and maybe send you up in flames. Sure enough, his Panther passed two disabled Panzer IVs, their crews glumly trudging west on foot.
He gnawed on his lower lip. Oels was only about fifteen kilometers east of Breslau. The Lizards were already shelling the city that sprawled across the Oder. If they established artillery in Oels, they could pound Breslau to pieces, scattering about so many of their little mines that no one would dare walk the streets, let alone drive armored vehicles through them.
And yet, he’d been ordered to give up a position he could have held for a long time-ordered in terms so peremptory that he knew protest would have been useless. Stand-fast orders were what he’d come to expect, even when standing fast cost more lives than retreating would have. Now, when standing fast made sense, he had to give ground. If that wasn’t insanity, what was it?
His discontent deepened when his panzer finally reached its new assigned position. The village just outside of Breslau that was the linchpin of the new German line might have held fifty people before the war. It was on flat ground and, as far as he could see, had no special reason for existing. Some rolls of barbed wire strung across the landscape and a few trenches for infantrymen didn’t constitute a line of defense as far as he was concerned, no matter how imposing the wire and trenches might seem on a map in a warm room out of the range of the guns.
His driver thought the same thing. “Sir, they made us pull back tothis?” he said in incredulous dismay.
“Johannes, believe you me, I wouldn’t have given you the order on my own,” Jager answered.
Somebody had at least some small sense of how to defend a position. A soldier in a white parka over black panzer coveralls directed the Panther to a barn with a doorway that pointed east: a good firing position if the Lizards broke out of Oels and stormed toward Breslau. A couple of hundred meters farther west lay a stone farmhouse behind which he could retreat after firing, and which would do for a second position. But if the Lizards broke out of Oels, nothing here, at least, was going to stop them from breaking into Breslau.
To give the artillery its due, it was trying to make sure the Lizards didn’t break out of Oels. Just west of the town, the ground jerked and quivered and shook like a live thing. Every gun the Germans had around Breslau must have been pounding that stretch of terrain. Jager hadn’t seen such a bombardment since his days in the trenches in World War I.
He didn’t see any shells fallingin Oels, though. TheWehrmacht had conceded the town to the Lizards, and for the life of him he didn’t understand why. They could consolidate there at their leisure for the next big push. They were taking advantage of everything the Germans gave them, too. Through field glasses, he watched panzers and lorries coming into Oels and gathering east of the town.
“What the hell’s going on?” Gunther Grillparzer demanded, out and out anger in his voice. “Why aren’t we throwing gas into Oels? The wind’s blowing in the right direction-straight out of the west. We’ve got a wonderful target there, and we’re ignoring it I’ve seen the high mucky-mucks do some really stupid things, but this takes the cake.”
Jager should have pounced on that open profession of heresy, but he didn’t. He couldn’t He felt the same way himself. He peered through the field glasses for another thirty seconds or so, then lowered them with a grunt of disgust. He’d risked his neck to throw nerve gas at the gas-mask factory in Albi. Why the devil wasn’t the artillery heaving it toward the Lizards now?
“Tear me off a chunk of that bread, will you, Gunther?” he said. When the gunner handed him a piece of the brown loaf, he dug out a tinfoil tube of meat paste and squeezed a blob onto the bread. Just because your commanders belonged in an institution for the feebleminded was no reason to starve. Die, yes; starve, no.
He was looking down at the bread and meat when the gloomy interior of the barn suddenly filled with a light as bright as-brighter than-day.
Johannes, the driver, let out a cry in his earphones: “My eyes!”
Jager looked up, just for an instant, then l
owered his gaze once more. Like the sun, the fireball in what had been Oels was too brilliant to look at. The light that filled the barn went from white to yellow to orange to red, slowly fading as it did so. When Jager looked up again, he saw a great fiery pillar ascending toward the heavens, coloring the clouds red as blood.
The ground shook under the treads of the Panther. A wind tore briefly at the barn doors, then subsided. Stuck inside the turret, Grillparzer demanded, “What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know,” Jager said, and then, a moment later, “My God!” He knew what an explosive-metal bomb had done to Berlin; he’d heard about what had happened to Washington and Tokyo and south of Moscow. But knowing what such a bomb could do and seeing the bomb do it-the difference between those two was like the difference between reading a love poem and losing your virginity.
“They really did it,” he breathed in amazement.
“Who really did what, sir?” the panzer gunner asked indignantly.
“The physicists at-oh, never mind where, Gunther,” Jager answered; even in the midst of such awe as he’d not felt in church for years, he did not forget his worship of the great god Security. “The point is, we’ve just given the Lizards what they gave Berlin.”
The panzer crew shouted like men possessed. Jager joined the exultation, but more quietly. That sense of awe still filled him. Some of the explosive metal was what he’d snatched, Prometheus-like, from the Lizards. It was seldom given to a colonel of panzers to feel he’d personally turned the course of history. Jager had that feeling now. In an odd way, it seemed larger than he was.
He shook himself, bringing the real world back into focus. “Johannes, how are your eyes?” he asked over the intercom.
“I’ll be all right, sir, I think,” the driver answered. “It was like the world’s biggest flashbulb went off a centimeter in front of my nose. I still see a big ring of smeary color; but it’s getting smaller and dimmer.”
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