“Reverse!” Hessef yelled into Ussmak s hearing diaphragm. “Get out of here!” The order was sensible, and Ussmak obeyed it. But the commander of the landcruiser behind him didn’t have reflexes as fast as Hessef’s (maybe they weren’t ginger-enhanced). With a loud crunch, the rear of Ussmak’s machine slammed into the front of that one. A moment later, the landcruiser in front of Ussmak backed into him.
Had the terrorists who planted the explosive under the road stayed around, they might have had a field day attacking stuck landcruisers with firebombs. Perhaps they hadn’t realized how well their plan would work: the multiple accident of which Ussmak found himself a part was far from the only one in the line of landcruisers. The machines, fortunately, were tough, and suffered little damage.
The same could not be said about the Big Uglies who’d been standing anywhere near where the bomb went off. Ussmak watched other Tosevites carry away broken, bleeding bodies. They were only aliens, and aliens who hated him at that, but Ussmak wanted to turn his eye turrets away from them anyhow. They reminded him how easily he could have been broken and bleeding and dead.
With patience, which the Race did have in full measure, the snarls unkinked and the landcruisers chose the next best route out of Besancon. This time a special antiexplosives unit preceded the lead machine. Near the bridge over the River Doubs, everybody halted: the unit found another bomb buried under a new patch of pavement.
Even though air conditioning kept the interior of the landcruiser’s fighting compartment comfortably warm, Ussmak shivered. The Big Uglies had known what the males of the Race would do, and done their best to hurt them not just once but twice-and their best had been pretty good.
Eventually, the landcruisers did reach square 27-Red. By then, of course, the raiders and their mortar were long gone.
Back at the barracks that evening, Ussmak said to Drefsab, “They made Idiots of us today.”
“Not altogether,” Drefsab said. Ussmak waggled one eye turret slightly in a gesture of curiosity. The other male amplified: “We did a good job of making idiots of ourselves.” With that Ussmak could not disagree. It was, however, an opinion to be shared only among those of inconsequential rank-or so he thought.
But he was wrong. Three days later, inspectors of a sort altogether different from the first lot descended on Besancon. Most of the males whom Ussmak knew to be ginger tasters (and especially ginger tasters who’d let their habits get the better of them) disappeared from the base: Hessef and Tvenkel among them.
Drefsab wasn’t seen at Besancon any more after that, either. Ussmak wondered at the connection; before long, wonder hardened into near certainty. He knew more than a little relief that the inspectors hadn’t swept him up along with his crewmales.
If I ever see Drefsab again, I’ll have to thank him, he thought.
“Jesus Christ, Jager, you’re still alive?” The big, deep voice boomed through the German encampment.
Heinrich Jager looked up from the pot of extremely ersatz coffee he was brewing over a tiny cookfire. He jumped to his feet. “Skorzeny!” He shook his head in bemusement. “And you wonder that I’m alive, after the madcap stunts you’ve pulled off?” He hurried over to shake the SS man’s hand.
Otto Skorzeny said, “Pooh. Yes, my stunts, if that’s what you want to call them, are maybe more dangerous than what you do for a living, but I spend weeks between them planning. You’re in action all the time, and going up against Lizard panzers isn’t a child’s game, either.” He glanced at Jager’s collar tabs. “And a colonel, too. You’ve stayed up with me.” His rank badges these days also had three pips.
Jager said, “That’s your fault. That madman raid on the Lizards in the Ukraine-” He shuddered. He hadn’t had a tank wrapped around him like an armored skin then.
“Ah, but you brought home the bacon, or half the rashers, anyhow,” Skorzeny said. “For that, you deserve everything you got.”
“Then you should be a colonel-general by now,” Jager retorted. Skorzeny grinned; the jagged scar that ran from the corner of his mouth toward his left ear pulled up with the motion of his cheek. Jager went on, “Here, do you have a cup? Drink some coffee with me. It’s vile, but it’s hot.”
Skorzeny pulled the tin cup from his mess kit. As he held it out, tie clicked his heels with mocking formality. “Danke sehr, Herr Oberst!”
“Thank me after you ye tasted it,” Jager said. The advice proved good; Skorzeny’s scar made the face he pulled seem only more hideous. Jager chuckled under his breath-wherever he’d seen Skorzeny, in Moscow, in the Ukraine, and now here, the man hadn’t cared a fig for military discipline. And now here-Jager’s gaze sharpened. “What does bring you here, Standartenfuhrer Skorzeny?” He used the formal SS title with less irony than he would have aimed at any other soldier of Hitler’s elite.
“I am going to get into Besancon,” Skorzeny announced, as if entering the Lizard-held city were as easy as a stroll around the block.
“Are you?” Jager said noncommittally. Then he brightened. “Did you have anything to do with that bomb last week? I hear it took out one of their panzers, maybe two.”
“Petty sabotage has its place, but I do not engage in it.” Skorzeny grinned again, this time like a predator. “My sabotage is on the grand scale. I aim to buy something of value which one of our little scaly friends is interested in selling. I have the payment here.” He reached over his shoulder, patted his knapsack.
Jager jabbed: “They trust you to carry gold without disappearing?”
“O ye of little faith.” Skorzeny sipped the not-quite-coffee again. “That is without a doubt the worst muck I have ever drunk in my life. No, the Lizards care nothing for gold. I have a kilo and a half of ginger in there, Jager.”
“Ginger?” Jager scratched his head. “I don’t understand?”
“Think of it as morphine, if you like, then, or perhaps cocaine,” Skorzeny said. “Once the Lizards get a taste for it, they’ll do anything to get more, and anything includes, in this case, one of the rangefinders that make their panzers so deadly accurate.”
“Better than what we have in the Panther?” Jager set an affectionate hand on the road wheel of the brush-covered machine parked by the fire. “It’s a big step up from what they put into my old Panzer III.”
“Get ready for a bigger step, old son,” Skorzeny said. “I don’t know all the details, but I do know it’s a whole new principle.”
“Can we use it if you get it?” Jager asked. “Some of the things the Lizards use seem good only for driving our own scientists mad.” He thought of his own brief and unhappy stay with the physicists who were trying to turn the explosive metal he and Skorzeny had stolen into a bomb.
If Skorzeny had that same thought, he didn’t show it. “I don’t worry about such things. That’s not my job, no more than setting foreign policy for the Reich. My job is getting the toys so other people can play with them.”
“That is a sensible way for a soldier to look at the world.” After a couple of seconds, Jager wished he hadn’t said that. He’d believed it wholeheartedly until he found out how the SS went about massacring Jews: someone had given them that job, and they went ahead and did it without worrying about anything else. He changed the subject: “All right, you’re going into Besancon to get this fancy new rangefinder. How do you expect me to help? We’re still close to eighty kilometers north of it, and if I roll out my panzers for an attack, they’ll all be scrap metal before I get a quarter of the way there. Or have you arranged for your Lizard who likes ginger so well to sell you all their rangefinders instead of just one?”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Skorzeny slugged back the rest of his coffee, made a horrible face. “This Dreck is even worse after it cools down. Damn, Jager, you disappoint me. I expected you to run me right down the Grande Rue in Besancon and on to the citadel, cannon blazing.”
“Good luck,” Jager blurted before he realized the other man was joking.
“How’s this,
then?” Skorzeny said, chuckling still. “Suppose you lay on an attack-a few panzers, artillery, infantry, whatever you can afford to expend and seem convincingly aggressive without hurting your defense too much-on the eastern half of the front. I want you to draw as much attention as you can away from the western section, where I, a simple peasant, shall pedal my bicycle-you do have a bicycle around here for me to pedal, don’t you? — into Lizard-held territory and on down to Besancon. I have a way to get word to you when I shall require a similar diversion to aid my return.”
Jager thought about the men and equipment he would lose in a pair of diversionary assaults. “The rangefinder is as good as all that?” he asked.
“So I’ve been told.” Skorzeny gave him a fishy stare. “Would you prefer formal written orders, Colonel? I assure you, that can be arranged. I’d hoped to rely more on our previous acquaintance.”
“No, I don’t need formal orders,” Jager said, sighing. “I shall do as you say, of course. I only hope this rangefinder is worth the blood it will cost.”
“I hope the same thing. But we won’t find out unless I get the gadget, will we?”
“No.” Jager sighed again. “When do you want us to put in the diversionary attack, Herr Standartenfuhrer?”
“Do what you need to do, Herr Oberst,” Skorzeny answered. “I don’t want you to go out there and get slaughtered because you hadn’t shifted enough artillery and armor. Will three days give you enough time to prepare?”
“I suppose so. The front is narrow, and units won’t have far to travel.” Jager also knew, but could not mention, that the more men and machines he fed into the assault, the more would be expended. War assumed expending soldiers. The trick was to keep from expending them on things that weren’t, worth the price.
He moved men, panzers, and artillery mostly by night, to keep the Lizards from noticing what he was up to. He didn’t completely fool them; their artillery picked up on the eastern sector of the front, and an air strike incinerated a couple of trucks towing 88mm antitank guns caught out in the open. But most of the shift went through without a hitch.
At 0500 on the morning of the appointed day, with dawn staining the eastern sky, artillery began flinging shells at the Lizards’ positions near the Chateau de Belvoir. Rifle-carrying men in field gray loped forward. Jager, standing up in the cupola as a good panzer commander should, braced himself as his Panther rumbled ahead.
The Lizards’ advance positions, being lightly held, were soon overrun, though not before one of the aliens turned a Panzer IV to Jager’s right to a funeral pyre with a rocket. He didn’t see any enemy panzers, for which he thanked God; intelligence said they’d pulled back toward Besancon after the rough time he’d given them in their latest attack.
But even without armor, the Lizards were a handful. Jager hadn’t pushed forward more than a couple of kilometers before a helicopter rose into the sky and peppered his force with rockets and machine-gun fire. Another panzer, this one a Tiger, brewed up. He winced-not only a powerful new machine, but also a veteran crew, gone forever. A lot of foot soldiers were down, too.
He got in sight of the main. Lizard position outside the Chateau de Belvoir, lobbed a couple of high-explosive shells at the chateau itself (not without an inward pang at destroying old monuments; he’d thought of archaeology as a career until World War I sucked him into the army for good), and, having taken enough casualties to provide the diversion Skorzeny wanted, withdrew to lick his wounds and wait to be called on to sacrifice again.
“I hope the Lizards don’t follow us home,” Klaus Meinecke said as the Panther made its way back to the start line. “If they do, they’re liable to catch us with our pants down around our ankles.”
“Too true,” Jager said; the gunner had found an uncomfortably vivid way to put words to his own fears.
Maybe the Lizards suspected the Germans of trying to lure them into a trap. Whatever their reasons, they didn’t pursue. Jager gratefully seized the time they gave him to rebuild his defensive position. After that, he went back to watchful waiting, all the while wondering how Skorzeny was going to get word to him that he needed more strong young men thrown into the fire.
A week after the diversionary attack, a Frenchman in a tweed jacket, a dirty white shirt, and baggy black wool trousers came up to him, sketched a salute, and said, in bad German, “Our friend with the”-his finger traced a scar on his left cheek-“he needs the help you promise. Tomorrow morning, he say, is the good time. You understand?”
“Oui, monsieur Merci,” Jager answered. The Frenchman’s thin, intelligent face did not yield to a smile, but one eyebrow rose. He accepted a chunk of black bread, offering in exchange a swig of red wine from the flask on his belt. Then, without another word, he vanished back into the woods.
Jager got on the field telephone to the nearest Luftwaffe base. “Can you give me air support?” he asked. “When their damned helicopter gunships show up, I lose panzers I can’t spare.”
“When I go after those gunships, I lose aircraft I can’t spare,” the Luftwaffe man retorted, “and aircraft are just as vital to the defense of the Reich as panzers. Guten Tag.” The phone line went dead. Jager concluded he was not going to get his air support.
He didn’t. The attack went on nonetheless. It even had a moment of triumph, when Meinecke incinerated a Lizard infantry fighting vehicle with a well-placed round from the Panther’s long 75mm gun. But, on the whole, the Germans suffered worse than they had in the first diversionary assault. That had put the Lizards’ wind up, and they were ready and waiting this time. Maybe that meant they’d pulled some troops from the western section of their line. Jager hoped so; it would mean he was doing what he was supposed to.
When he’d soaked up enough casualties and damage to make the Lizards believe (with luck) he’d really tried to accomplish something, he retreated once more. No sooner had he returned to the jumping-off point than a runner came panting up and said, “Sir; there’s a Lizard panzer advancing on our front line about five kilometers west of here.”
“A Lizard panzer?” Jager said. The messenger nodded. Jager frowned. That wasn’t a bad as it might have been, but even one Lizard panzer made a formidable foe. Poor Skorzeny, he thought: they must have caught on to his scheme this time.
Then anger surged through him at having to mount diversionary attacks in support of a plan that hadn’t been likely to succeed anyhow.
“Sir, that’s not all,” the messenger said.
“What else, then?” Jager asked.
“The panzer has a white flag flying from above the drivers station, sir,” the fellow answered, with the air of a man reporting something he doesn’t expect to be believed. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
“This I must see with my own eyes,” Jager said. He hopped into a little Volkswagen light army car, waved the messenger in beside him as a guide, and headed west. He hoped he had enough petrol to get where he was going. The light army car’s engine put out less than twenty-five horsepower and didn’t use much petrol, but the Wehrmacht had little to spare, either.
As Jager drove, a suspicion began to form in the back of his mind. He shook his head. No, he told himself. Impossible. Not even Skorzeny could-
But Skorzeny had. When Jager and the messenger pulled up in front of the Lizard panzer, the driver’s hatch came open and the SS man squeezed out, wriggling and twisting like a circus elephant inching through a narrow doorway.
Jager gave him a formal military salute. That didn’t seem good enough, so he also took off his cap, which made Skorzeny grin his frightening grin. “I give up,” Jager said. “How the devil did you manage this?” Just stainding in front of the Lizard panzer was frightening to a man who’d faced its like in battle. Its smooth lines and beautifully sloped armor made every German panzer save possibly the Panther seem not merely archaic but ugly to boot. Staring down the barrel of its big main armament was like looking into a tunnel of death.
Before answering, Skorzeny writhed and twist
ed; Jager heard his back and shoulders crunch. “Better,” he said. “By God, I felt like a tinned sardine cooped up in there, except they don’t have to bend sardines to get ’em into the tin. How did I get it? I tell you, Jager, I didn’t think I was going to get anything in Besancon. The Lizards just cleaned out every ginger-fresser they could catch.”
“I gather they didn’t catch them all,” Jager said, pointing to the panzer.
“Nobody ever does.” Skorzeny grinned again. “I made contact with one they’d missed. When I showed him all the ginger I had, he said, ‘You just want a rangefinder? I’d give you a whole panzer for that.’ So I took him up on it.”
“But how did you get it out of the city?” Jager asked plaintively.
“There were only two dicey bits,” Skorzeny said with an airy wave. “First was getting me into the vehicle park. We did that in dead of night. Second was seeing if I’d fit into the driver’s compartment. I do, but just barely. After that, I up and drove it away. It steers on the same principles as our machines, but it’s a lot easier to drive: the steering is power assisted and the gearbox shifts automatically.”
“Didn’t any of them challenge you?” Jager said.
“Why should they? If you were a Lizard, you’d never think a human could take off in one of your panzers, now would you?”
“God in heaven, no,” Jager answered honestly. “You’d have to be out of your mind even to dream such a thing.”
“Just what I thought,” Skorzeny agreed. “And just what the Lizards thought, too, evidently. Since they weren’t looking for me to try any such thing, I was able to bring it off right under their snouts. You couldn’t pay me enough to try it twice, though. Next time, they’ll be watching and-” He made a chopping motion with his right hand.
Jager still couldn’t believe the axe hadn’t fallen during this first mad escapade. He nervously glanced up at the sky. If a Lizard plane spotted them now, gunships and fighter-bombers would be on the way here in bare minutes to destroy their own panzer.
Tilting the Balance w-2 Page 37
