Tilting The Balance (5 page)

The rest of the crew scrambled out, too. The driver, a big sandy-haired youngster named Rolf Wittman, grinned impudently. “Could be worse, sir,” he said. “At least it hasn’t caught fire the way a lot of them do.”

“Oh, for the blithe spirit of the young,” Jager said, acid in his voice. He wasn’t young himself. He’d fought in the trenches in the First World War, stayed in the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr after it was over. He’d switched over to panzers as soon as he could after Hitler began rearming Germany, and was commanding a company of Panzer Ills in the Sixteenth Panzer Division south of Kharkov when the Lizards came.

Now, at last, the Reich had made a machine that might make the Lizards sit up and take notice when they met it. Jager had killed a Lizard tank with his Panzer
III
, but he was the first to admit he’d been lucky. Anybody who came out alive, let alone victorious, after a run-in with Lizard armor was lucky.

The Panther he now stood beside seemed decades ahead of his old machine. It incorporated all the best features of the Soviet T-34 – thick sloped armor, wide tracks, a powerful 75mm gun – into a German design with a smooth suspension, an excellent transmission, and better sights and gun control than Jager had ever imagined before.

The only trouble was, it was a brand-new German design. Bumping up against the T-34 and the even heavier
KV-I
in 1941 had been a nasty surprise for the Wehrmacht The panzer divisions had held their own through superior tactics and started upgunning their Panzer Ills and IVs, but getting better tanks became urgent. When the Lizards arrived, urgent turned mandatory.

And so development had been rushed, and the Panther, powerful machine that it was, conspicuously lacked the mechanical reliability that characterized older German models. Jager kicked at the overlapping road wheels that carried the tracks. “This panzer might as well have been built by an Englishman,” he growled. He knew no stronger way to condemn an armored fighting vehicle.

The rest of the crew leaped to their panzer’s defense. “It’s not as bad as that, sir,” Wittman said.

“It has a real gun in it, by Jesus,” added Sergeant Klaus Meinecke, “not one of the peashooters the English use.” The gun was his responsibility; he sat to Jager’s right in the turret, on a chair that looked like a black-leather-covered hockey puck with a two-slat back.

“Having a real gun doesn’t matter if we can’t get to where we’re supposed to use it,” Jager retorted. “Let’s fix this beast, shall we, before the Lizards fly by and strafe us.”

That got the men moving in a hurry. Attack from the air had been frightening enough when it was a Shturmovik with red stars painted on wings and fuselage. It was infinitely worse now; the rockets the Lizards fired hardly ever missed.

“Probably the fuel lines again,” Wittman said, “or maybe the fuel pump.” He rummaged in one of the outside stowage bins for a wrench, attacked the bolts that held the engine louvers onto the Panther’s rear deck.

The crew was a good one, Jager thought. Only veterans, and select veterans at that, got to handle Panthers: no point in frittering away the important new weapon by giving it to men who couldn’t get the most out of it.

Klaus Meinecke grunted in triumph. “Here we go. This gasket in the pump is kaput Do we have a spare?” More rummaging in the bins produced one. The gunner replaced the damaged part, screwed the top back onto the fuel pump case, and said, “All right, let’s start it up again.”

The crew had to take off the jack to get at the starter dog clutch. “That’s poor design,” Jager said, and pulled a piece of paper and pencil out of a pocket of his black panzer crewman’s tunic. Why not stow jack vertically between exhausts, not horizontally below them? he scribbled.

Cranking up the Panther was a two-man job. Wittman and Meinecke did the honors. The engine belched, farted, and came back to life. After handshakes all around, the crew climbed back into the machine and rolled on down the road.

“We’ll want to look for a good patch of woods where we can take cover for the night,” Jager said. Such a patch might be hard to find. He checked his map. They were somewhere between Thann and Belfort, heading down to try to hold the Lizards away from the latter strategic town.

Jager stuck his head out of the drum-shaped cupola. If he was where he thought he was – He nodded, pleased with his navigation. There ahead stood Rougement-le-Chateau, a Romanesque priory now in picturesque ruin. Navigating through the rugged terrain of Alsace and the Franche-Comte was a very different business from getting around on the Ukrainian steppe, where, as on the sea, you picked a compass heading and followed it. If you got lost here, heading across country wasn’t so easy. More often than not, you had to back up and retrace your path by road, which cost precious time.

The woods were still leafless, but Jager found a spot where bare branches interlaced thickly overhead. Behind scattered clouds, the pale winter sun was low in the west. “Good enough,” he said, and ordered Wittman to pull off the road and conceal the Panther from prying eyes in the sky.

Within the next half hour, four more tanks – another Panther, two of the new Panzer IVs with relatively light protection but a long 75mm gun almost as good as the Panther’s, and a huge Tiger that mounted an 88 and armor poorly sloped but so thick and heavy that it made the panzer slower than it should have been-joined him there. The crews swapped rations, spare parts, and lies. Somebody had a deck of cards. They played skat and poker till it got too dark to see.

Jager thought back to the splendid organization of Sixteenth Panzer when the division plunged into the Soviet Union. Back then, the thought of getting tanks into action by these dribs and drabs would have caused apoplexy in the High Command. That was before the Lizards had started plastering the German rail and road networks. Now any movement toward the front was counted a success He squeezed butter and meat paste from their tubes onto a chunk of black bread. As he chewed, he reflected that a lot of things had happened to him that he never would have expected before the Lizards came. He’d fought against the alien invaders side by side with a band of Russian partisans, most of them Jews.

He hadn’t had much use for Jews before then. He still didn’t have a whole lot of use for them, but now he understood why the Jews of Warsaw had risen against the town’s German occupiers to help the Lizards take it. Nothing the aliens did to them could come close to what they’d suffered at the hands of the Reich.

And yet those same Polish Jews had let him cross their territory, and hadn’t even confiscated from him all the explosive metal that had been his booty from the joint German-Soviet raid on the Lizards. True, they’d taken half to send it to the United States, but they’d let him deliver the rest to his own superiors. Even now, German scientists were working to avenge Berlin.

He took another bite. Even that wasn’t the strangest. Had anyone told him on June 22, 1941, that he would – have an affair with? fall in love with? (he still wasn’t sure about that himself} – a Soviet pilot, his most likely reaction would have been to punch the teller in the eye for calling him a fairy. On the day the war with the Soviet Union started, no one in Germany knew the Russians would use female fliers in combat.

He hoped Ludmila was all right. They’d first met in the Ukraine, where she’d plucked him and his gunner (he hoped Georg Schultz was all right, too) off a collective farm and taken them to Moscow so they could explain to the Red Army brass how they’d managed to kill a Lizard panzer. He’d written to her after that – she had some German, he a little Russian – but got no answer.

Then they’d come together at Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had pinned on him the German Cross in gold (a medal so ugly he wore only the ribbon these days) and she’d flown in Molotov for consultation with, the Fuhrer. He smiled slowly.

That had been as magical a week as he’d ever known.

But what now? he wondered. Ludmila had flown back to the Soviet Union, where the
NKVD
would not look kindly upon her for sleeping with a Nazi… any more than the Gestapo was pleased with him for sleeping with a Red. “Screw ‘em all,” he muttered, which drew a quizzical glance from Rolf Wittman. Jager did not explain.

A motorcycle came put-putting slowly down the road, its headlight dimmed almost to extinction by a blackout slit cap. With the Lizards’ detectors, even that could be dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving a winding French road in pitch darkness.

The motorcycle driver spotted the panzers off under the trees. He stopped, throttled down, and called, “Anyone know where I can find Colonel Heinrich Jager?”

“Here I am,” Jager said, standing up. ‘Was ist los?’

“I have here orders for you, Colonel.” The driver pulled them out of his tunic pocket.

Jager unfolded the paper, stooped down and held it in front of the motorcycle headlamp so he could read it. “Scheisse,”he exclaimed. “I’ve been recalled. They just put me back in frontline service, and now I’ve been recalled.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver agreed. “I am ordered to take you back with me.”

“But why?” Jager said. “It makes no sense. Here I am an experienced fighter for Fuhrerand Vaterland against the Lizards. But what good will I do in this Hechingen place? I’ve scarcely even heard of it.”

But he had heard of it, and fairly recently, too. Where? When? He stiffened as memory came.

Hechingen was where Hitler had said he was sending the explosive metal. Without another word, Jager walked over to his Panther, got on the radio, and turned command over to the regimental lieutenant-colonel. Then he slung his pack onto his shoulders, went back to the motorcycle, climbed on behind the driver, and headed back toward Germany.

Ludmila Gorbunova did not care for Moscow. She was from Kiev, and thought the Soviet capital drab and dull. Her impression of it was not improved by the endless grilling she’d had from the
NKVD
. She’d never imagined the mere sight of green collar tabs could reduce her to fearful incoherence, but it did.

And, she knew, things could have been worse. The chekists were treating her with kid gloves because she’d flown Comrade Molotov, second in the Soviet Union only to the Great Stalin, and a man who loathed flying, to Germany and brought him home in one piece. Besides, the rodina – the motherland – needed combat pilots. She’d stayed alive through most of a year against the Nazis and several months against the Lizards. That should have given her value above and beyond what she got for ferrying Molotov around.

Whether it did, however, remained to be seen. A lot of very able, seemingly very valuable people had disappeared over the past few years, denounced as wreckers or traitors to the Soviet Union or sometimes just vanished with no explanation at all, as if they had suddenly ceased to exist…

The door to the cramped little room (cramped, yes, but infinitely preferable to a cell in the Lefortovo prison) in which she sat came open. The
NKVD
man who came in wore three crimson oblongs on his collar tabs. Ludmila bounced to her feet. “Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!” she said, saluting.

He returned the salute, the first time that had happened since the
NKVD
started in on her. “Comrade Senior Lieutenant,” he acknowledged. “I am Boris Lidov.” She blinked in surprise; none of her questioners had bothered giving his name till now, either. Lidov looked more like a schoolmaster than an
NKVD
man, not that that meant anything.

But he surprised her again, saying, “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, thank you very much, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,” she answered – quickly, before he changed his mind. The German attack had deranged the Soviet distribution system, that of the Lizards all but destroyed it. These days, tea was rare and precious.

Well, she thought, the
NKVD
will have it if anyone does. And sure enough, Lidov stuck his head out the door and bawled a request. Within moments, someone fetched him a tray with two gently steaming glasses. He took it, set it on the table in front of Ludmila. “Help yourself,” he, said. “Choose whichever you wish; neither one is drugged, I assure you.”

He didn’t need to assure her; that he did so made her suspicious again. But she took a glass and drank. Her tongue found nothing in it but tea and sugar. She sipped again, savoring the taste and the warmth. “Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. It’s very good,” she said.

Lidov made an indolent gesture, as If to say she didn’t need to thank him for anything so small. Then he said idly, as if making casual conversation, “You know, I met your Major Jager – no, you’ve said he’s Colonel Jager now, correct? – your Colonel Jager, I should say, after you brought him here to Moscow last summer.”

“Ah,” Ludmila said, that being the most noncommittal noise she could come up with. She decided it was not enough.

“Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, as I have said before, he is not my colonel by any means.”

“I do not necessarily condemn,” Lidov said, steepling his fingers. “The ideology of the fascist state is corrupt, not the German people. And” – he coughed dryly-”the coming of the Lizards has shown that progressive economic systems,

capitalist and socialist alike, must band together lest we all fall under the oppression of the ancient system wherein the relationship is slave to master, not worker to boss.”

“Yes,” Ludmila said eagerly. The last thing she wanted to do was argue about the dialectic of history with an
NKVD
man, especially when his interpretation seemed to her advantage.

Lidov went on, “Further, your Colonel Jager helped perform a service for the people of the Soviet Union, as he may have mentioned to you.”

“No, I’m afraid he didn’t. I’m sorry, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, but we talked very little about the war when we saw each other in Germany. We -” Ludmila felt her face heat. She knew what Lidov had to be thinking. Unfortunately-from her point of view – he was right.

He looked down his long, straight nose at her. “You like Germans well, don’t you?” be said sniffily. “This Jager in Berchtesgaden, and you attached his gunner” – he pulled out a scrap of paper, checked a name on it-”Georg Schultz, da, to the ground crew at your airstrip.”