Striking the Balance

Ducks quacked on the far side of the river. The marshes over there were a national wildlife refuge. Mutt wished he could row across with a shotgun instead of the tommy gun he was toting. There had been an observation post over there, on top of a steel tower a hundred feet high. That had given the game wardens a dandy view of poachers. These days, it would have given the Lizards a dandy view of the surrounding countryside, but it had been blown up in one round or another of the fighting over central Illinois.

Troops were scattered up and down the river, to escape detection if possible and to seem like routine patrols if they were spotted. Mutt and Muldoon made the rounds, telling the men what Szymanski had told them. It wasn’t fresh news; they’d been getting ready for this mission quite a while now. Telling them one more time what they were supposed to do wasn’t going to hurt, though. More times than he could count, Mutt had seen a ballplayer swing when he’d got the bunt sign or take when the hit and run was on. Somebody was still likely to foul up some way or other, even after a last go-round. Mutt had long since given up expecting perfection in men or their plans.

Twilight fell, then darkness. In the water, a fish leaped and fell back with a splash. Back when Mutt had gone through this country in his minor-league playing days, they’d taken more fish out of the Illinois than from any other river save the Columbia. It wasn’t like that now, not with so many factories pouring filth into the water, but you could still do all right with a rod and reel, or even with a pole and a string and a hook.

Mutt looked down at his watch. The softly glowing numbers and hands told him it was a quarter to ten. “Into the boats,” he whispered. “And quietly, God damn it, or we’re dead meat before we even get goin’.”

At exactly ten o’clock by his watch, he and the rest of the company started rowing down the Illinois toward Havana. The oars seemed to make a dreadful racket as they dipped into the water and splashed out again, but no Lizard machine guns opened up on the far side of the river. Mutt sighed with relief. He’d been afraid they were heading into a trap right from the start.

At 10:02, artillery and mortars and machine guns opened up on Havana from the west and south. “Right on time,” Mutt said; in the sudden chaos, noise from the boats mattered a lot less.

The Lizards reacted promptly, with artillery of their own and with small-arms fire. Daniels tried to gauge whether they were shifting troops from the camp, which was north of Havana, to meet the noisy, obvious threat the Americans were showing them. For his sake, he hoped they were.

A hot yellow glow sprang up in the southwest and swiftly spread toward Havana. Mutt wanted to whoop with glee, but had the good sense to keep his voice down: “They really went and did it, boys. They lit off the Spoon River.”

“How many gallons of gas and oil did they pour into it before they lit a match?” somebody in the boat said. “How long could that stuff keep a tank running, or a plane?”

“I dunno,” Mutt answered. “I figure they’re usin’ it against the enemy this way, too, an’ if it rattles the Lizards so much that they forget to shoot at me, I ain’t gonna complain. Now come on, boys, we gotta pull like bastards, get across the Illinois before the Spoon runs into it. We don’t manage that”-he let out a wheezy chuckle-“our goose is cooked.”

Little tongues of flame, drifting on the water, were already at the junction of the rivers and starting to flow down the Illinois. More floating fire followed. The Lizards didn’t run gunboats along the river or anything like that, so the fire wasn’t likely to do them any real harm, but it did draw their attention toward the Spoon and the territory west of it-and away from the boats sliding down the Illinois toward Havana from the north.

“Come on, pull hard, come on, come-” Mutt tumbled off his seat in the middle of a word when the boat ran hard aground. He came up laughing. If you made a fool of yourself in front of your men, you had to admit it. He jumped out onto the riverbank. Mud squelched under his boots. “Let’s go break our boys outta stir.”

He looked away from the burning Spoon River to let his eyes adapt to the darkness. That black shape there wasn’t forest; the forest around it had been cut down. He waved an arm to urge his men after him and trotted toward the Lizards’ prison camp.

Not too far away, Sergeant Muldoon was warning, “Spread out, you dumb bastards. You want ’em to go picking you off the easy way?”

The prison camp was designed more to keep people in than to keep them out. Nothing prevented the Americans from drawing close to the main gate, which lay on the northern side. Mutt, in fact, was beginning to think they could march on in when a couple of Lizards did open up on them from a little guardhouse.