In the Balance (12 page)

“For the Fatherland,” Jäger echoed. Given that the alternative was bailing out of his tank and trying to foot it across the Ukraine through Lizards and partisans both, fighting for the Fatherland looked like the best bet he had. He leaned down into the turret, called to Dieter Schmidt: “To the prepared position.”

The Panzer III slowly rumbled forward. So did the other two survivors of the tank company. In slots dug into the reverse slope of the rise, they exposed only the tops of their turrets to the enemy. Jäger stood up in the cupola, peered ahead with field glasses. He took even fewer chances than he had against the Russians. Shrubs tied to his leather headgear broke up
his outline; he used his free hand to shield the binoculars so no sun reflected off their lenses.

Sure enough, there were the Lizards, eight or ten tanks’ worth, with more vehicles scurrying along behind to support them. Jäger recognized the ones with small turrets as troop carriers, on the order of the German SdKfz 251 but far more dangerous—they could fight his panzers on largely even terms. And the Lizards’ tanks …

“You know what’s the funny thing, Georg?” he said as he lowered himself once more.

“Tell me anything funny about the Lizards,
Herr
Major,” the gunner grunted. “I will laugh I promise you.”

“They’re lousy tankers,” Jäger said. He was a lousy tankman himself, but only in the literal sense of the word. No one who was lousy in the metaphorical sense could have lasted almost a year on the eastern front.

Sure enough, Schultz laughed. “They’ve been good enough to kick our ass.”

“It’s the panzers, not the crews,” Jäger insisted. “They have better guns than ours, better armor, and God only knows how they make engines that don’t smoke. But tactics—
pfui?”
He curled his lip in disdain. “The Russians have better sense. They just motor along shooting at anything that happens to cross their path. They aren’t even looking this way, though it’s an obvious place for trouble. Stupid!”

“No doubt a run through the
Panzer Lehr
training division would improve their skill,
Herr
Major,” Schultz said dryly. “But if the tanks themselves are good enough, how good do the tankers have to be?”

Jäger grunted. It was a cogent question. In Panzer IIIs, little
Pimpfs
from the Hitler Youth, boys too young to shave, could have taken out whole divisions of British tanks from the Great War: the rhomboidal monsters were too slow to run and too lightly armed to fight. He’d thought the Panzer III a great tank until he ran up against his first Russian T-34, and a good tank even afterward. Now—now he might as well have been in one of those obsolete rhomboids himself.

“We do what we can, Georg,” he said. The gunner nodded.

Jäger stuck his head out of the cupola again. The Lizards were trundling happily past his strongpoint, no more than five hundred meters away, without the slightest idea he was there. He glanced over to Ernst Riecke and Uwe Tannenwald, his other surviving tank commanders, and held up one finger. Both men waved to show they understood. Hanging around for more than one shot against the Lizards was an invitation to a funeral.

The company commander pointed to one of the troop carriers. “That one, Georg,” he said quietly.

“Ja,”
the gunner said. He spoke to the loader. “Armor-piercing.”

“Armor-piercing,” Stefan Fuchs echoed. He pulled the black-tipped round out of the ammunition rack, loaded it into the five-centimeter gun, closed the breech.

The gunner traversed the turret a few degrees so it bore on the troop carrier. He took his eyes away from the gunsight for an instant to make sure Fuchs was clear of the recoil, then looked back and squeezed the trigger at almost the same time.

The cannon roared. Through his field glasses, Jäger saw a hole appear in the troop carrier’s flank. “Hit!” he shrieked. The carrier slewed sideways, stopped. It was burning. A hatch came down in the rear. Lizards started bailing out. German foot soldiers opened up on them, picking them off as they emerged.

“Back!” Jäger shouted. If he waited around to see how the foot soldiers did, one of those Lizard panzers would blow him to bits. Already, with terrifying speed, their turrets were traversing to bear on his position. Dieter Schmidt jammed the tank into reverse. It jounced down the low slope. So did Sergeant Tannenwald’s. Ernst Riecke was a split second too slow. Jäger watched in dismay as the turret flew off his panzer and crushed an infantryman who was scrambling to get out of the way.

Later
, Jäger told himself,
I’ll grieve
. That assumed there would be a
later
for him. At the moment, the assumption looked bad. One of the things he’d learned fighting the Russians was to have more than one firing position available whenever he could. His second one was at the base of the rise.

“Maybe we’ll give ’em a surprise, Major,” Schultz said. He and Fuchs already had another AP round loaded and ready. The gun bore on the place where the Lizard panzers were likeliest to breast the rise.

A couple of foot soldiers dashed forward with satchel charges. That meant the tanks were close, then. Machine guns chattered furiously. An explosion sent up smoke and dirt, then another. Jäger hoped the brave men hadn’t thrown away their lives for nothing.

Then he had no time for hope or fear, for a Lizard panzer nosed over the horizon right where he’d thought it would—the Lizards really were lousy tankmen. The Panzer III’s cannon roared as he drew in breath to yell, “Fire!”

Schultz was an artist with the long gun. He put the AP round right in the middle of the tiny bit of belly plate the enemy tank exposed as it came over the rise. The glacis plate laughed at even high-velocity five-centimeter shells. The belly plate, as on merely human panzers, was thinner. The shell pierced it. The tank stopped.
They’ll have to take the driver out of there with a spoon
, Jäger thought.

Two Lizards popped out of the turret, one after the other. The hull machine gun from Jäger’s tank cut them down.

Tannenwald’s tank had done almost as well as the company commander’s. Its first shot knocked the track off a Lizard panzer’s road wheels. The hit tank swerved, out of control. A foot soldier ran up to it, tossed a potato-masher grenade into the open cupola. Its small blast was followed an instant later by a big one as the panzer’s ammunition went off.

“Back again!” Jäger told Schmidt. Already they’d hurt the Lizards worse in this engagement than ever before. That was important, but it would matter only so much if he wound up dead … as he probably would as soon as a Lizard panzer made it onto the reverse slope of that little rise.

A scream in the sky—Death would come even without the Lizards’ tanks, then. Their aircraft were just as deadly. Jäger resigned himself. Bombs burst all around—the other side of the rise, the side the Lizards were still climbing.

“Stuka!” Georg Schultz screamed in the voice of a man who knows himself reprieved.

“By God, it is,” Jäger said. He, by contrast, spoke softly, for he could scarcely believe he might yet live a while longer. The Lizards had taken as dreadful a toll on the
Luftwaffe
as on the
Wehrmacht
. But this pilot, somehow, had still got his dive-bomber into the air and still had the nerve to fly it straight down the Lizards’ throats.

More bombs went off in quick succession—he’d loosed the whole stick. Only a direct hit would take out a panzer, but even experienced tankers had to hesitate before advancing through that sudden storm of explosives.

The Stuka pilot couldn’t have been more than a hundred meters off the ground when he pulled out of his dive. Two of the Lizard panzers fired their guided rockets at him but the missiles shot harmlessly past his plane. He skimmed away, his landing gear just above the waving grass of the steppe.

“Get us out of here,” Jäger told Dieter Schmidt. The Panzer III’s engine roared as the driver obeyed. Jäger felt an itch between his shoulder blades. He knew that was stupid. If one of the Lizards’ shells got him, he’d be dead too fast to know it.

He looked back toward the rise. If his tank could make it over the next one before the Lizards climbed this one and spotted him, he really did have a chance to get away. He wouldn’t have believed it when the engagement started, but it was true. He felt a surge of pride. His troops had hurt the Lizards, and not many units could boast of that.
Gott mit uns
, he thought,
we might even do it again
.

Two Lizard panzers came over the rise. His own tank was only halfway up the next slope. A turret swung his way. His eyes went up to the sky, seeking, praying for, another Stuka. But God lives in only so many machines. The Lizards didn’t even need to slow down to fire.

Less than a heartbeat after the big cannon spat smoke and flame, Jäger felt the mother of all kicks in the arse. His trusty panzer, which had served so well for so long, died under him. Smoke poured up through the engine vents of the rear deck.

“Out, out, out!” he screamed. He had almost been thrown out, on his head. Only two armored walls and the full weight of the engine had kept the enemy shell out of the fighting compartment. Once the fire got going, nothing would hold, that at bay.

Machine-gun bullets stitched the air around him as he pulled himself out of the cupola and dove into the tall grass. Other hatches came open. His crew began bailing out with him. A bullet struck home with a noise like a slap on a bare, wet back. Somebody shrieked.

The clean green smell of the weeds through which Jäger scrambled filled his nostrils. He had two somewhat contradictory goals. He wanted to put the hulk of the killed tank between himself and the oncoming Lizards, but he also wanted to get as far away from that hulk—and from the Lizards—as he could. The ammunition in the Panzer III was going to start cooking off any minute now, maybe any second, and the Lizards were not likely to be well-disposed toward German tankmen, especially a crew that had managed to destroy one of their fancy machines.

Another shell slammed into the Panzer III. It went up with a roar.
Stupid
, Jäger thought,
stupid and wasteful
. That tank was already dead meat. Meanwhile, though, machine-gun bullets probed the grass. They made tiny, whispering
tic-tic-tic
sounds as they clipped the leaves. Jäger wondered what kind of sounds he would make if they clipped him.

The Lizards’ tank rolled majestically past, fewer than fifty meters off. Jäger lay facedown and unmoving. If the enemy saw him, maybe they’d think he was already dead. Not only was it faster than both his Panzer III and a T-34, it was ghost-quiet to boot.

Somewhere a few hundred meters away, an MG-34 began to bark. Bullets ricocheted off the armor of the Lizard panzer. Its machine gun returned fire. The panzer itself turned toward the German machine-gun position.

As he crawled in the opposite direction, Jäger almost bumped into Georg Schultz. After an instant of fright, the two men grinned at each other. “Good to see you, sir,” the gunner said, grin broad and white in his dirty face.

“And you,” Jäger answered. “Have you seen Fuchs?” Schqltz’s grin slipped. “He didn’t make it out.”

“That was the shriek, then,” Jäger said. The gunner nodded. Jäger went on, “What about the two up front?”

“Don’t know.”

They found Dieter Schmidt a few minutes later. Klaus Bauer, the hull gunner, remained missing. “We both got out,” Schmidt insisted. “I don’t know what happened to him afterward.” He didn’t say
nothing good
, but the words hung in the air.

“Lucky we didn’t blow up when we were hit,” Jäger said.

Schmidt surprised him by laughing. “Luck, hell, sir. We were just about dry of petrol, that’s all. We had maybe enough for another kilometer or two, no more.”

“Oh,” Jäger said. He started to laugh himself, though it wasn’t really funny. Here he’d just fought what had to be one of the most successful small-unit actions ever against the Lizards, and to what result? Only the final destruction of his tank company. How many actions like that could the
Wehrmacht
take before there wasn’t any
Wehrmacht
any more?

For that matter, even this action wasn’t over yet. Lizard infantry had been moving up along with their armor. Jäger had a pistol in his holster that he hadn’t fired in months. Schultz and Schmidt were both clutching their personal Schmeissers. Submachine guns were better than nothing, but they didn’t have the range to make proper infantry weapons.

“What now, sir?” Schultz asked.

“Now we get out of the sack,” Jäger said. “If we can.”

Moishe Russie held up the Bible, read from the Book of Joshua in a loud voice: “‘And it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city.’”

The crowd of Jews behind him cheered. At his side, his wife, Rivka, beamed at him, her sweet brown eyes enormous in her thin face. Their son, Reuven, was even thinner, his eyes, so like his mother’s, even bigger. A starving child could not help rousing horror and pity in any adult who saw him—save perhaps in the Warsaw ghetto, where the sight had grown so common that even horror and pity failed at last.

“What now,
Reb
Moishe?” someone called.

“I’m no
reb,”
he said, looking modestly down at the ground.

“No
reb?”
several people exclaimed together in tones of disbelief. One added, “Who but you asked the Lord for a sign and was answered?” That tale had run through the ghetto almost before the miraculous light in the sky faded. Every tale with hope in it spread even faster than typhus. With only hope to live on, the Jews made of it a banquet.

Someone else, a woman, said, “He’s no
reb;
he’s a prophet. Like Joshua whose Book he reads, he made the walls fall down.”

The Jews cheered again. Russie felt his ears grow hot.
He
hadn’t made the ghetto walls fall down, and he knew it. But the bombs that screamed
out of the sky and smashed brick to powder seemed to have come from the same—people? monsters?—who’d touched off the light in the sky he’d taken for a signal from On High.