Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  “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?” Jäger 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?” Jäger 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, Jäger 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 Besançon 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, Jäger, you disappoint me. I expected you to run me right down the Grande Rue in Besançon and on to the citadel, cannon blazing.”

  “Good luck,” Jäger 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 Besançon. I have a way to get word to you when I shall require a similar diversion to aid my return.”

  Jäger 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,” Jäger 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.” Jäger sighed again. “When do you want us to put in the diversionary attack, Herr Standartenführer?”

  “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.” Jäger 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 Château de Belvoir. Rifle-carrying men in field gray loped forward. Jäger, 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 Jäger’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 Besançon after the rough time he’d given them in their latest attack.

  But even without armor, the Lizards were a handful. Jäger 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 Château de Belvoir, lobbed a couple of high-explosive shells at the château 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,” Jäger 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. Jäger 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,” Jäger 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.

  Jäger 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. Jäger 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. Jäger 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?” Jäger said. The messenger nodded. Jäger 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?” Jäger 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,” Jäger 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 Jäger 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 Jäger 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.

  Jäger 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,” Jäger 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 twisted; Jäger 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, Jäger, I didn’t think I was going to get anything in Besançon. The Lizards just cleaned out every ginger-fresser they could catch.”

  “I gather they didn’t catch them all,” Jäger 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?” Jäger 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?” Jäger 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,” Jäger 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.

  Jäger 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.

  As if picking the thought from his head, Skorzeny said, “I’d better move along. I need to get this beast under cover as quick as I can, then arrange to ship it back to Germany so the lads with the high foreheads and the thick glasses can figure out what makes it tick.”

  “Can you wait long enough for me to look inside?” Without waiting for an answer, Jäger scrambled up onto the upper deck of the fighting compartment and stuck his head through the driver’s hatch. He envied the Lizards the compactness their smaller body size allowed; Skorzeny must have been bent almost double in there.

  The driver’s controls and instruments were a curious mix of the familiar and the strange. The wheel, the foot pedals (though there was no clutch), and the shift lever might have come from a German panzer. But the driver’s instrument panel, with screens and dials full of unfamiliar curlicues that had to be Lizard letters and numbers, looked complicated enough to have belonged in the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf 190.

  In spite of that, the space wasn’t cluttered: very much on the contrary. Refined was the word that crossed Jäger’s mind as he contemplated the layout. In any German panzer—any human panzer—not everything was exactly where it would most efficiently belong. Sometimes you couldn’t see a dial without moving your head, or reach for your submachine gun without banging your wrist against a projecting piece of metal. None of that here—all such tiny flaws had been designed out of the area. He wondered how long the Lizards had been making little progressive changes to get everything both perfect and perfectly finished. A long time, he suspected.

  He climbed up onto the top of the turret, undogged the commander’s cupola. Ignoring Skorzeny’s impatient growl, he slithered down into the turret. This was where he belonged in a panzer, where he could most easily judge what was similar and what was different about the way the Lizards did things.

  Again, he noticed refinement. No sharp edges, no outthrust chunks of metal anywhere. You could, if you were Lizard-sized, move around without fear of banging your head, Then he noticed the turret had no loader’s seat, just as there’d been no hull gunner’s position in the Lizard panzer’s forward compartment. Did the gunner or commander have to load shells, then? He couldn’t believe it. That would badly slow the panzer’s rate of fire, and he knew from bitter experience the Lizards could shoot quicker than their German counterparts.

  Some of the gadgetry that filled the turret without crowding it had to be an automatic loader, then. He wondered how it worked. No time to wonder, not now, except to hope German engineers could copy it. The gunner’s station, like the driver’s instrument panel, was a lot more complex than he was used to. He wondered how the Lizard who sat there could figure out what he needed to do in time to do it. Pilots managed, so maybe the gunner could, too. No—again from experience, certainly the gunner could, too.

  Skorzeny’s voice, peremptory now, came down through the open cupola: “Get your arse out of there, Jäger. I’m going to drive this beast away right now.”

  Regretfully—he hadn’t seen all he wanted—Jäger slithered out and dropped down to the ground. The SS man climbed up onto the deck of the Lizard panzer and got back into the forward compartment. He was thicker through the waist than Jäger and had a devil of a time squeezing in, but he managed.

  Back when the Wehrmacht first ran into the Russian T-34, there’d been talk of building an exact copy. In the end, the Germans didn’t do that, although the Panther incorporated a lot of the T-34’s best features. If the Reich copied this Lizard panzer, Jäger thought, they’d have to train ten-year-olds to crew it. Nobody else really fit.

  Skorzeny started up the motor. It was amazingly quiet, and didn’t belch clouds of stinking fumes—refinement again. Jäger wondered what it used for fuel. Skorzeny p
ut it in gear and drove off. Jäger stared after him, shaking his head. The man was an arrogant bastard, but he accomplished things nobody in his right mind would dream of trying, let alone pulling off.

  Atvar glowered at the male who stood stiffly in front of his desk. “You did not clean out that clutch of ginger-lickers as thoroughly as you should have,” he said.

  “The exalted fleetlord is correct,” Drefsab replied tonelessly. “He may of course punish me as he sees fit.”

  Some of Atvar’s anger evaporated. Drefsab had himself been trapped in ginger addiction; that he worked at all against his corrupted colleagues gave the fleetlord a weapon he would otherwise have had to do without. Nevertheless, he snapped, “A landcruiser disappearing! I never would have thought it possible.”

  “Which is probably just how it happened, Exalted Fleetlord,” Drefsab said: “No one else thought it was possible, either, and so no one took the precautions that would have kept it from happening.”

  “That Big Ugly with the scar again,” Atvar said. “They all look alike, but that male’s disfigurement makes him stand out. He has given us nothing but grief—the landcruiser now, and spiriting Mussolini away from right under our muzzles . . . and I have some reason to believe he was involved in the raid where the Big Uglies hijacked our scattered nuclear material.”

  “Skorzeny.” Drefsab turned the sibilants at the beginning and. middle of the name into long hisses.

  “That is what Deutsch propaganda called him after the Mussolini fiasco, yes,” Atvar said. “In spite of your unfortunate taste for ginger, Drefsab, you’remain, I believe, the most effective operative I have available to me.”

  “The exalted fleetlord is gracious enough to overestimate my capacities,” Drefsab murmured.

  “I had better not be overestimating them,” Atvar said. “My orders for you are simple: I want you to rid Tosev 3 of this Skorzeny, by whatever means become necessary. Losing him will hurt the Deutsche more than losing a hundred landcruisers. And the Deutsche, along with the British and the Americans, are the most troublesome and ingeniously obstreperous Big Uglies there are, which, considering the nature of the Big Uglies, is saying a great deal. He must be eliminated and you are the male to do it.”