Upsetting the Balance (80 page)

His sigh turned the air around him smoky. Softly, he said, “I hope we last long enough to see how bad the local mud is.”

Rance Auerbach stared out across the snowy east-Colorado prairie. He didn’t see anything much, which suited him fine. He wanted to be off fighting the Lizards, not making like an MP. What he wanted and the orders he got weren’t the same beast.

He wasn’t the only one on whom those orders grated, either. Lieutenant Magruder rode up to him and asked, “Who is this guy we’re supposed to be looking for again? Waste of time, if you ask me—not that anybody did.”

“Fellow’s name is Larssen, says Colonel Nordenskold.” Auerbach laughed. “One squarehead telling us to go find another one. The colonel got word from General Groves that this Larssen plugged two guys and then headed east. They don’t want him to make it into Lizard country.”

“Why do they give a damn? That’s what I want to know, and nobody’s told me yet,” Magruder said. “If he’s a bastard and he’s heading toward the Lizards, why shouldn’t we let him be their headache?”

“Colonel Nordenskold told you just as much as he told me,” Auerbach answered, “so I don’t know, either.” He could make some guesses, though. He’d led the cavalry detachment that had escorted Groves—who’d been a colonel then—all the way from the East Coast to Denver. He didn’t know for certain what Groves had carried in that heavy, heavy pack of his, but he suspected. The explosions in Chicago and Miami hadn’t done anything to make him think he was wrong, either.

If Groves wanted this Larssen stopped, it was probably because Larssen had something to do with those explosions. If he made it through to the Lizards, who could say what would happen next? The likeliest thing Auerbach could think of was Denver going up in a flash of light If that happened, the U.S.A.’s chance to beat the Lizards would probably go up with it.

If, if, if . . . All of it was guesswork, and he knew as much. All the same, that wasn’t why he kept quiet about it. The fewer people who knew about heavy-duty bombs, the less chance word about them had of reaching the Lizards. Other speculations he would have shared with Magruder, but not these. He wished he hadn’t been in the position to make these particular guesses himself.

Magruder changed the subject: “He’s going to get past us on a
bicycle
?” He patted his horse’s neck. The animal whickered softly.

“He’s supposed to be good at roughing it,” Auerbach answered. “Maybe he’ll ditch the bike and try it on foot. This is a big country, and we’re spread thin. He might slip through. Hell, Bill, he might already have slipped through. And the other thing of it is, he might not be within a hundred miles of here. No way to know.”

“No way to know,” Magruder echoed. “So here we are, out beating the bushes for this one guy instead of doing something to twist the Lizards’ little scaly tails. That’s a hell of a thing. He must be one really important so-and-so if they want him caught so bad.”

“Does sound that way,” Auerbach agreed. He felt Magruder’s eyes on him, but pretended he didn’t. His lieutenant might not know as much as he did, but wasn’t bad at piecing things together.

Auerbach peered south from US 40. Somewhere a couple of miles down there was the little town of Boyero. A squad was going through there now. The rest of his men were strung out along the dirt road that led from Boyero to the highway, and north of US 40 toward Arriba on US 24. Farther north, troopers from Burlington took over for his company. One lone man shouldn’t have been able to slip through that net, but, as he’d told Magruder, it was a big country, and they were spread thin.

“One thing,” Magruder said, perhaps trying to look on the bright side: “It’s not like he’s going to be able to fool us by making like he’s somebody else. There’s nobody else on the road to pretend to be.”

“You’re right about that,” Auerbach said. “Country like this, there wouldn’t have been a lot going on even before the Lizards came. Now there’s nothing.”

Behind heavy clouds, the sun slid toward the distant—and now obscured—Rockies. Auerbach wondered if Larssen had the guts to move at night. He wouldn’t have wanted to try it, not on a bicycle. Maybe on foot . . . but, while that upped your chances of slipping through, it also slowed your travel and left you running the risk of being far from cover when day found you.

A rider came pounding down the dirt road toward US 40. Auerbach spotted blond hair around the edges of the helmet and nodded to himself—Rachel Hines was the most recognizable trooper in his command.

She reined in, saluted, and said, “Sir, Smitty and me, we think we seen somebody heading our way across the fields, but as soon as whoever it was spotted us, he went to ground. He couldn’t hardly think we were Lizards, so—”

“So he must have thought we were looking for him,” Auerbach finished. Excitement tingled through him. He hadn’t expected to run across Larssen, but now that he had, he was ready to run him down. “I’m with you,” he said. “We’ll pick up every other soldier on the way to where you and Smitty were at—that way, in case this turns out not to be Larssen, we won’t give him a free road east.” He turned to Magruder. “Bill, you stay here and ride herd on things. If we run into trouble, send more men after us.”

“Yes, sir,” Magruder said resignedly. “Why did I know you were going to tell me that?”

“Because you’re smart. Come on, Rachel.” With knees and reins, he urged his horse up into a fast trot. Rachel Hines had galloped to give him the news, but stayed with him now. Every few hundred yards, they’d gather up another trooper. By the time they got back to where Smitty was waiting, they headed up a squad’s worth of men.

“We’re gonna get the guy, eh, Captain?” Rachel said. Auerbach heard something of the eagerness he felt in her voice. “Don’t quite know why we want him, but we’re gonna get him.”

“Yeah, reckon we are.” Auerbach heard the question in Rachel’s voice, but if he wouldn’t give out his guesses for Magruder, he wouldn’t do it for her, either. He turned to the troopers he’d brought in his wake. “Isbell, you and Evers hold horses. If we get in trouble out there, one of you ride like hell back to the highway and tell Lieutenant Magruder to get reinforcements up here.” The men he’d designated both nodded. He peered out over the prairie. He saw no signs anybody was out there, but Larssen was supposed to know what he was doing. “Okay, let’s spread out and get him. Be on your toes. He’s got a gun and he uses it.”

Before she separated from the rest, Rachel Hines said, “Thanks for not making me stay back with the critters, Captain.”

Auerbach realized he hadn’t even thought of that. He’d accepted her as a soldier like any other. He shook his head. Would he have imagined such a thing before the war? Never in a million years.

He strode across the chilly ground. These had probably been wheatfields before the Lizards came, but they didn’t look to have been harvested the last couple of years. Even after the winter die-off, a lot of the brush was waist high. Bushes had taken root here and there among the grain, too. The country looked pretty flat, but it gave better cover than you’d think. The grain and bushes also broke up the snow on the ground, making it harder to spot somebody’s tracks.

If Larssen was smart, he’d just sit tight wherever he was and hope they’d miss him—if he was really here. But being that smart wasn’t easy—and if Auerbach turned the whole company loose on this stretch of ground, anybody hiding would get found.

He didn’t want to do that, in case he was wrong. Pulling in a raft of men would leave a hole in the screen the Army had set up to keep the fugitive from slipping east “Larssen!” Auerbach shouted. “Come out with your hands up and nobody’ll get hurt. Make it easy on yourself.”
Make it easy on us, too.

Larssen didn’t come out. Auerbach hadn’t expected that he would. He took another couple of steps toward where Rachel and Smitty had seen whoever it was take cover. A bullet cracked past his ear. An instant later, he heard the sound of the gunshot. He was already throwing himself flat.

“Down!” he yelled from behind a tumbleweed. He looked around, but dead plants didn’t let him see far. He shouted orders: “Spread out to right and left and take him.” Now they knew where Larssen was. Getting him out wouldn’t be any fun, but it was something they knew how to do, tactics that came almost as automatically as breathing.

Larssen fired again, not at Auerbach this time. “You’re all against me,” he shouted, his voice thin in the distance. “I paid back two. I’ll pay back the rest of you sons of bitches if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

Out on either flank, a couple of Auerbach’s troopers started shooting at Larssen, not necessarily to hit him but to make him keep his head down while their buddies slid forward. Not far from Auerbach, Rachel Hines fired a couple of shots. That was his cue to dash ahead and then flop down in back of another bush. He squeezed off three rounds from his own M-l, and heard Rachel and a couple of other troopers advancing on either side of him.

If you were being moved in on from the front and both flanks the way Larssen was, you had only two choices, both bad. You could stay where you were—and get nailed—or you could try and run—and get nailed.

Larssen sat tight. A cry from off to Auerbach’s left said he’d hit somebody. Auerbach bit his lip. Casualties came with the job. He understood that. When you went up against the Lizards, you expected not to come back with a full complement, and hoped you’d do them enough damage to make up for your own losses. But having somebody wounded—Auerbach hoped the trooper was just wounded—hunting down one guy who’d gone off the deep end . . . that was a waste, nothing else but.

He was within a hundred yards of Larssen now, and could hear him even when he was talking to himself. Something about his wife and a ballplayer—Auerbach couldn’t quite make out what. He fired again. Rachel Hines scurried past him. Larssen rose up, shot, flopped back down. Rachel let out a short, sharp shriek.

Larssen bounced to his feet. “Barbara?” he shouted. “Honey?”

Auerbach fired at him. Several other shots rang out at the same instant Larssen reeled backwards, collapsed bonelessly. His rifle fell to the ground. He wasn’t going anywhere, not any time soon. Auerbach ran up to Rachel Hines. She already had a wound dressing out, and was wrapping it around her hand.

She looked up at Auerbach. “Clipped the last two joints right off my ring finger,” she said matter-of-factly. “Don’t know what I’ll do about a wedding band if I ever get married.”

“You’ll figure out something.” Auerbach bent down and kissed her on the cheek. He’d never done that for a wounded noncom before. Seeing that she wasn’t seriously injured, he said, “I’m going to make sure of the son of a gun now. I think maybe hearing you yell like that startled him into breaking cover.”

“It’s not like I done it on purpose,” she answered, but she was talking to his back.

Jens Larssen was still twitching when Auerbach got up to him, but he didn’t see any point in calling for a corpsman. Larssen had taken one in the chest, one in the belly, and one in the side of the face. He wasn’t pretty and he was dead, only his body didn’t quite know it yet. As Auerbach stood over him, he let out a bubbling sigh and quit breathing.

“Well, that’s that,” Auerbach said, bending to pick up Larssen’s Springfield—no point in leaving a good weapon out to rust. “Now we can get on with the important stuff, like fighting the war.”

The
Naxos
chugged on toward Rome. It flew a large red-white-and-blue tricolor Captain Mavrogordato had hauled out of the flag locker. “I want the Lizards’ airplanes to think we are French,” he explained to Moishe. “We have friends on the ground in Rome who know we are bringing them good things, but the pilots—who can say what they know? Since the Lizards hold southern France, this will help them believe we are perfectly safe.”

“What happens when we leave Rome and head for Athens and Tarsus and Haifa?” Moishe asked. “Those places, they won’t be so happy to see a ship that might have come out of Lizard-held country.”

Mavrogordato shrugged. “We have plenty of flags in the locker. When the time comes, we will pick another one that better suits our business there.”

“All right,” Russie said. “Why not?” He’d never known such a blithe swashbuckler before. Mavrogordato was smuggling things to the Lizards, undoubtedly smuggling things away from them, and was smuggling him and his family right past their scaly snouts. For all the Greek captain worried about it—airplanes aside—he might have had the whole Mediterranean to himself.

“But what if something goes wrong?” Moishe had asked him, some hundreds of kilometers back toward the west. He himself was a chronic worrier, and was also of the opinion that, considering everything that had happened to him over the past few years, he’d earned the right.

But Mavrogordato had shrugged then, too. “If something goes wrong, I’ll deal with it,” he’d answered, and that was all he would say. Moishe reluctantly concluded he didn’t say any more because he didn’t know any more. Moishe would have had plans upon plans upon plans, each one ready in case the trouble that matched it arrived.

Whether the plans would have worked was another question. Given his track record, it wasn’t obvious. But he would have had them.

“How far from Rome are we now?” he asked as the Italian countryside crawled past beyond the starboard rail.

“Thirty-five kilometers, maybe a bit less,” Mavrogordato answered. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours—in time for lunch.” He laughed.

Moishe’s stomach rumbled in anticipation. Neither the British freighter that had brought him down near Spain nor the
Seanymph
had had a galley that could compare to the
Naxos’.
Mavrogordato’s crew might have been short on shaves and clean clothes and other evidence of spit and polish, but they lived better than British seamen imagined. Russie wondered if the English had some sort of requirement denying them as much pleasure as possible. Or maybe they were just a nation of bad cooks.

“I hate to say it, but I wish the Germans were in Italy instead of the Lizards,” Moishe said. “It gives them too good a base for pushing north or east.”