Upsetting the Balance (32 page)

He bent over a man who wouldn’t live long. The fellow stared up at him. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said in a choking voice. Blood poured from his nose and mouth.

Mordechai knew what last rites were, but not how to give them. It didn’t matter; the Pole died before he could do anything. Anielewicz looked around for someone he actually had some hope of helping.

WHAM!
Off to the north, toward Piotrków, another explosion came out of nowhere. Distance made it faint and attenuated. If the Germans had aimed the last rocket and this one at the same place, their aiming left a lot to be desired. Kilometers separated the two impacts.

WHAM!
Yet another explosion, this one a lot closer. Anielewicz staggered, went to one knee. A chunk of sheet metal crashed to the ground a couple of meters from where he had stood. Had it landed on top of him . . . He tried not to think about things like that.

Men started running toward the northern edge of the camp. Looking around, Anielewicz saw why: the flying bomb had landed almost directly on top of a Lizard guard tower and had blown a great hole in the razor wire that confined the prisoners. Moreover, fragments from it had played havoc with the towers to either side. One was on fire, the other knocked off its legs.

Anielewicz started running, too. He’d never have a better chance to escape. The Lizards opened fire from more distant guard towers, but they hadn’t figured on losing three at once. Some men went down. More scrambled into the crater the rocket had made and out the other side to freedom.

As with the first flying bomb that had fallen in the camp, this one left part of its carcass behind by the crater. Some of the metal skin had peeled off, including the pieces that had almost mashed him. He’d been an engineering student before the war, and peered curiously at tanks—fuel tanks?—wrapped in glass wool, and at as much clockwork and piping as he’d ever seen all in one place. He wished he could take a longer, closer look, but getting away was more important.

Bullets rattled off the flying bomb, then went elsewhere in search of more prey. Mordechai ran. The bullets came back, kicking up dirt around his feet. He rolled on the ground and thrashed wildly, in the hope of convincing the Lizard gunner he’d been hit. When the bullets stopped playing around him again, he got up and ran some more.

“Sneaky bastard!” someone shouted from behind him in German. His head whipped around. He might have known Friedrich would get out while the getting was good.

Ahead, the fleeing men fanned out broadly, some making for the brush a few hundred meters away, others pelting up the road toward Piotrków, still others heading east or west across the fields toward farmhouses where they might find shelter.

Friedrich slogged up even with him. “Damned if I don’t think we’re going to get away with this,” he bawled.

“Kayn aynhoreh,”
Mordechai exclaimed.

“What’s that mean?” the big German asked.

“Something like, don’t tempt fate by saying anything too good.” Friedrich grunted and nodded. Most of the bullets were behind them now. The Lizards seemed to have given up on the prisoners who’d escaped fastest, and were concentrating on keeping any more men from getting out through the hole the flying bomb had blown in the wire.

Friedrich swerved to put some of the brush between him and the prison camp. Panting, he slowed to a fast walk. So did Anielewicz. “Well, Shmuel, you damned Jew, it’s just the two of us now,” Friedrich said.

“So it is, you stinking Nazi,” Mordechai answered. They grinned at each other, but cautiously. Each of them sounded as if he were making a joke, but Anielewicz knew he’d meant what he said, and had a pretty good notion Friedrich had been kidding on the square, too.

“What do we do now?” Friedrich asked. “Besides keep moving, I mean.”

“That comes first,” Anielewicz said. “We ought to try to get far enough away so they can’t track us with dogs, or whatever they use. Afterwards . . . maybe we can hook on with a local guerrilla band and keep on making life interesting for the Lizards. Or maybe not. This part of Poland is pretty much
Judenfrei,
thanks to you Nazi bastards.”

Now Anielewicz didn’t sound like a man who was joking. Friedrich said, “Yeah, well, I can tell you stories about that, too.”

“I’ll bet you can,” Mordechai said. “Save ’em, or we’ll be trying to kill each other, and that would just make the Lizards laugh. Besides, the Poles around here may not like Jews—”

“They don’t,” Friedrich said with a grim certainty Anielewicz didn’t want to explore.

Mordechai went on, “—but they don’t like Germans, either.” Friedrich scowled, but didn’t interrupt. Anielewicz finished, “Best bet, as far as I can see, is heading up to Lodz. It’s a good-sized city; strangers won’t stick out the way they would in Piotrków. And it still has a good many Jews left.”

“As if I should care about that.” Friedrich snorted, then sobered. “Or maybe I should—you Jew bastards have had practice with an underground, haven’t you?”

“You Nazi bastards made us practice with one,” Anielewicz said. “So—Lodz?”

“Lodz,” Friedrich agreed.

Cabbage, black bread, potatoes. For variety, turnips or beets. Heinrich Jäger wished he were back at the front, if for no other reason than the tinfoil tubes of meat and butter front-line soldiers got. You didn’t starve to death on cabbage, black bread, and potatoes, but after a while you started to wish you would. No matter how important the work he was part of, life in Germany these days felt cold and gray and dull.

He speared the last piece of potato, chased the last bit of sauerkraut around his plate, soaked up the last juices from the sauerkraut with his bread—which, he had to admit, was better than the really horrid stuff the bakers had turned out in 1917. That still didn’t make it good.

He got to his feet, handed the plate and silverware to a kitchen worker who took them with a word of thanks, and started out of the refectory. Opening the door, he almost ran into a tall man in a black SS dress uniform gaudy with silver trim.

The SS colonel folded him into a bearhug. “Jäger, you miserable son of a bitch, how the hell are you?” he boomed. A couple of physicists who had been eating in the refectory with Jäger stared in disbelief and dismay at the raucous apparition invading their quiet little corner of the world.

Life might remain cold and gray, but it wouldn’t be dull any more. “Hullo, Skorzeny,” he said. “How goes with you?” Life might abruptly end around
Standartenführer
Otto Skorzeny, but it would never, ever be dull.

The scar that furrowed the SS man’s left cheek pulled half his grin up into a fearsome grimace. “Still going strong,” he said.

“As if you knew any other way to go,” Jäger replied.

Skorzeny laughed, as if that had been some sort of clever observation rather than simple truth. “You know someplace where we can talk quietly?” he asked.

“You don’t have any idea how to talk quietly,” Jäger said, and Skorzeny laughed again. “Come on, I’ll take you to my quarters.”

“I’d need a trail of bread crumbs just to find my way around this place,” Skorzeny grumbled as Jäger led him through the medieval maze of Schloss Hohentübingen. Once in Jäger’s room, he threw himself into a chair with such abandon that Jäger marveled when it didn’t collapse under him.

“All right, how do you want to try to get me killed now?” Jäger asked.

“I’ve come up with a way, never you fear,” the SS man said airily.

“Why does this not surprise me?”

“Because you’re not a fool,” Skorzeny answered. “Believe me, I have come to know fools in all their awesome variety these past few years. Some of them wear uniforms and think they’re soldiers. Not you—so much I give you.”

“And for so much I thank you,” Jäger said. He remained unsure whether Skorzeny qualified as a fool in uniform, even after most of a year’s acquaintance. The man took chances that looked insane, but he’d brought off most of them. Did that make him lucky or good? His string of successes was long enough for Jäger to give him some benefit of the doubt. “How are you going to twist the Lizards’ stumpy little tails this time?”

“Not their tails, Jäger—the other end.” Skorzeny gave that grin again. Perhaps he intended it as disarming; no matter how he intended it, the scar twisted it into something piratical. “You’ve heard that the English have started using mustard gas against the Lizards?”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.” Jäger’s stomach did a slow lurch. He’d spent hours sealed into a stifling gas mask during the First World War. He also remembered comrades who hadn’t got their masks on and sealed in time. His mouth curled down. “I don’t blame them, not really, but it’s an ugly business. And why did they have that gas ready, d’you think?—to use against us when we got over the Channel, unless I miss my guess.”

“Probably.” Skorzeny waved a dismissive hand. He didn’t care about why; what and how were all that mattered to him. He added, “Don’t get up on your high horse, either. If the English had tried gassing us, we’d have shown them mustard gas is a long way from the nastiest thing around. We do things better these days than they did in the last war.”

“No doubt.” Skorzeny sounded very certain. Jäger wondered how he knew, how much he knew, and how the new gases, whatever they were, had been tested—and on whom. Asking such questions was dangerous. To Jäger’s mind, so was
not
asking them, but few of his fellow officers agreed.

Skorzeny went on, “We didn’t use gas against the Lizards for the same reason we didn’t use gas against the English: for fear of getting it back in turn. Even if we have better, being on the receiving end of mustard gas wouldn’t have been any fun.”

“You’re right about that,” Jäger said wholeheartedly.

“With the Lizards on their island, though, the English stopped worrying about things like that.” Skorzeny chuckled. “What’s the old saying? ‘Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged tomorrow’? Something like that, anyhow. The English must have figured that if they were going down, they wouldn’t go down with any bullets left in the gun. And do you know what, Jäger? The Lizards must not have used gas in their own wars, because they don’t have any decent defenses against it.”

“Ah,” Jäger said. “So someone has found an Achilles’ heel for them at last, eh?” He had a sudden vision of sweeping the Lizards off the Earth, though he had no idea how much gas it would take to do that, or how many—or how few—people would be left alive after it was done.

“A weak place, anyway,” Skorzeny said. “But they aren’t stupid, any more than the Russians are. Do something to them and they’ll try to figure out how to stop you. They don’t have many masks of their own—maybe they don’t have any; nobody’s sure about that—but they’re sure to have captured English samples by now, and they do have collaborators. There’s a factory in the south of France that’s gearing up to turn out gas masks to fit snouty Lizard faces.”

“A light begins to dawn,” Jäger said. “You want something dreadful to happen to this factory.”

“Give the man a cigar!” Skorzeny exclaimed, and from an inner pocket of his tunic he produced a veritable cigar, which he handed to Jäger with a flourish. Jäger seized it with no less alacrity than he would have accepted the Holy Grail. Now Skorzeny’s grin, though lopsided, seemed genuinely amused. “I know just what I want to happen to the building, too.”

“Do you?” Jäger said. “How does it involve me?”

“Think of it as—poetic justice,” Skorzeny answered.

One of Rance Auerbach’s troopers kept singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” over and over again. Auerbach was damn sick of the song. He wanted to tell the cavalryman to shut up, but couldn’t make himself do it. You dumped your worries however you could when you headed into a fight.

And Lydia, Kansas, was where two companies of cavalry were supposed to be going: a tiny, nowhere town on Kansas State Highway 25
,
a two-lane stretch of nowhere blacktop that paralleled US 83’s north-south path through Kansas a few miles to the west of the federal road, but that petered out well before it reached the Nebraska state line.

Lieutenant Bill Magruder said, “The damned Lizards should have moved into Lydia by now.”

“They’d better have moved into Lydia by now,” Auerbach answered feelingly. “If they haven’t, a lot of us are going to end up dead.” He shook his head. “A lot of us are going to end up dead any which way. Riding horses against the Lizards isn’t your basic low-risk business.”

“Radio traces have been telling ’em right where we’re at ever since we set out from Lamar,” Magruder said with a tight grin. “They should know we’re gettin’ ready to hit Lydia with everything we’ve got.”

“They should, yeah.” Auerbach’s smile was tight, too. The Lizards loved their gadgets, and believed in what those gadgets told them. If they intercepted radio signals that said two companies were heading toward Lydia to try to take it away from them, they’d take that seriously—and be waiting to greet the Americans when they arrived.

But it wasn’t two companies heading toward Lydia: it was just Auerbach’s radioman and half a dozen buddies, plus a lot of horses lashed together and carrying cloth dummies in the saddle. They never would have fooled anybody from the ground, but from the air they looked pretty good. The Lizards used aerial recon the same way they used radio intercepts. If you fed ’em what they already thought they were seeing or hearing, you could fool ’em. They went to Lydia—and you went to Lakin.

Thinking about carrier pigeons and nineteenth- versus twentieth-century warfare had given Auerbach the idea. He’d sold it to Colonel Nordenskold. Now it was his to execute . . . and if he’d guessed wrong about how the Lizards’ minds worked, they’d do some serious executing of their own.

He held up a leather-gauntleted hand to halt his command when they came to a tall stand of cottonwoods along the banks of the Arkansas River. “We’ll hold horses here,” he ordered. “We’re a little farther out than usual, I know, but we’ve got more horses along, too, since this is a two-company raid. We won’t find better cover for concealing them any closer to town. Mortar crews, machine gunners, and you boys with the bazooka, you’ll bring your animals forward. If we’re lucky, you can use ’em to haul the weapons out when we pull back.”