Tilting The Balance (47 page)

“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 twisted; J a’ger 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 Besangon. The Lizards just cleaned out every ginger-fresserthey 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.

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, Jager 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 Jager’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, Jager. I’m going to drive this beast away right now.”

Regretfully – he hadn’t seen all he wanted – Jager 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 Jager 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, Jager 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. Jager wondered what it used for fuel. Skorzeny put it in gear and drove off. Jager 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.”

Drefsab saluted. “Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done.”

After several months’ living and travel in places mostly without electricity, Sam Yeager had all but forgotten how wonderful having the stuff could be. The reasons weren’t always the obvious ones, either. Keeping food fresh was great, sure. So was having light at night, even if you did need blackout curtains so the Lizards wouldn’t spot it. But he hadn’t realized how much he missed the movies till he got to see one again.

Part of the feeling sprang from the company he kept. Having Barbara on the plush seat beside him, her hand warm in his, would have put a warm glow on anything this side of going to the dentist (not a major concern for Yeager anyhow, not with his store-bought teeth). Later, his hand would probably drop to her thigh. In the dim cavern of the movie theater, nobody was likely to notice, or to care if he did notice.

But part of what Sam got from the movies had nothing to do with Barbara. For a couple of hours, he could forget how miserable the world outside this haven on Sixteenth Street looked and pretend what happened on the screen was what mattered.

“Funny,” he whispered to Barbara as they waited for the projectionist to start the newsreel: “I can get out of myself with a good story in a magazine or a book, but watching a show is more special somehow.”

“Reading lets me get away from things, too,” she answered, “but a lot of people can’t escape that way. I feel sorry for them, but I know it’s true. The other thing is, when you’re reading, you’re by yourself. Here you’re with lots of other people looking for the same release you’re after. It makes a difference.”

“I found what I was after,” Sam said, and squeezed her hand. She turned to smile at him. Before she could say anything, the lights dimmed and the big screen at the front of the theater came to sparkling life.

The newsreel wasn’t the smoothly professional production it would have been before the Lizards came. Yeager didn’t know whether the aliens held Hollywood itself, but the distribution system for new films coming out of California had completely broken down.

What the moviegoers got instead was a U.S. Army production, probably put together right here in Denver. Some of the bits had sound added, some used cards with words on them, something Sam remembered from silent film days but had thought to be gone for good.

EASTERN
FRANCE
one of those cards announced. The camera panned slowly, lovingly, across burned-out Lizard tanks. A tough-looking fellow in German uniform walked among the wreckage.

People cheered wildly. Barbara murmured, “Has everyone forgotten the Nazis were our worst enemies a year ago?”