Tilting The Balance (46 page)

Ussmak laughed, too, a little. What the other crewmales said was true, but that didn’t mean he was happy about their going into action with heads full of ginger, even If he was doing the same thing himself, its not my fault, he thought virtuously. I didn’t know the Big Uglies would sneak a mortar into range.

Square 27-Red was northeast of the fortress, and east of the river that wound through Besangon. Following the two landcruiser crews that had managed to get moving ahead of him, Ussmak roared down the hill on which the fortress sat and toward the nearest bridge. Big Uglies stared at the landcruisers as they went by. Ussmak was sure they wished one of those mortar bombs had blown him to bits.

Sometimes when he rumbled through town, he drove unbuttoned and noticed the fancy wrought-iron grillwork that decorated so many of the local buildings. Not today; today, action was liable to be immediate, so he had only his vision slits and periscopes to peer through. The streets, even the big ones, were none too wide for landcruisers. He had to drive carefully to keep from mashing a pedestrian or two and making the Frangais love the Race even less than they did already.

He felt the explosion ahead as much as he heard it; for a moment, he thought it was an earthquake. Then gouts of flame shot from the lead landcruiser, which lay on its side. He slammed on the brakes as hard as he could. The murdered landcruiser’s ammunition load began cooking off, adding fireworks to the funeral pyre. Ussmak shivered in horror. If I’d been just a clawtip faster out of the revetment, I’d have driven over that bomb in the street, he thought. The Big Uglies must have figured out just how the Race would respond to a mortar attack and set their ambush accordingly.

“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 Besangon. 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 Besangon. 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 Besangon 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 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 Besangon,” Skorzeny announced, as if entering the Lizardheld 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

“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 Besangon 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 Besangon 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 Lizardheld territory and on down to Besangon. 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 Ch ateau 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 Besangon 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 machinegun 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?”