Striking the Balance

“It’s been known to happen,” Jager admitted, his voice dry.

“How?” she said.

The question, Ludmila realized, was far too broad, but Jager understood what she meant by it. “Carefully,” he answered, which made better sense than any reply she’d expected.

Mordechai Anielewicz had long since resigned himself to wearing bits and pieces of German uniforms. There were endless stocks of them in Poland, and they were tough and reasonably practical, even if not so well suited to winter cold as the ones the Russians made.

Dressing head to foot inWehrmacht gear was something else again, he discovered. Taking on the complete aspect of the Nazi soldiers who had so brutalized Poland gave him a thrill of superstitious dread, no matter how secular he reckoned himself. But it had to be done. Bunim had threatened reprisals against the Jews if they tried to block Lizard movements through Lodz. Therefore, the attack would have to come outside of town, and would have to seem to come from German hands.

Solomon Gruver, also decked out in German uniform, nudged him. He had greenery stuck onto his helmet with elastic bands, and was almost invisible in the woods off to the side of the road. “They should hit the first mines soon,” he said in a low voice distorted by his gas mask.

Mordechai nodded. The mines were German, too, with casings of wood and glass to make them harder to detect. A crew charged with repairing the highway had done just that… among other things. Over this stretch of a couple of kilometers, the Lizards would have a very bumpy ride indeed.

As usual, Gruver looked gloomy. “This is going to cost us a lot of men no matter what,” he said, and Anielewicz nodded again. Doing favors for the Germans was nothing he loved, especially after what the Germans had tried to do to the Jews of Lodz. But this favor, while it might help Germans like Heinrich Jager, wouldn’t do Skorzeny or the SS any good. So Anielewicz hoped.

He peered through the eye lenses of his own gas mask toward the roadway. The air he breathed tasted flat and dead. The mask made him look like some pig-snouted creature as alien as any Lizard. It was German, too-the Germans knew all about gas warfare, and had been teaching it to the Jews even before the Lizards came.

Whump!The harsh explosion announced a mine going off. Sure enough, a Lizard lorry lay on its side in the roadway, burning. From the undergrowth to either side of the road, machine guns opened up on it and on the vehicles behind it Farther off, a German mortar started lobbing bombs at the Lizard convoy.

A couple of mechanized infantry combat vehicles charged off the road to deal with the raiders. To Anielewicz’s intense glee, they both hit mines almost at once. One of them began to burn; he fired at the Lizards who emerged from it. The other slewed sideways and stopped, a track blown off.

The weapon with which Anielewicz hoped to do the most damage, though, involved no high explosives whatever: only catapults made with lengths of inner tube and wax-sealed bottles full of an oily liquid. As he and Gruver had learned, you could fling a bottle three hundred meters with old rubber like that, and three hundred meters was plenty far enough. From all sides, bottles of captured Nazi nerve gas rained down on the stalled head of the Lizard column. Still more landed farther down its length once the head had stalled. They didn’t all break, but a lot of them did.

Lizards started dropping. They weren’t wearing masks. The stuff could nail you if it got on your skin, too. Since they wore only body paint, the Lizards were also at a disadvantage there-not that ordinary clothing was any sure protection. Mordechai had heard that the Germans made special rubber-impregnated uniforms for their troops who dealt with gas all the time. He didn’t know for certain whether it was true. It sounded typically German in its thoroughness, but wouldn’t you stew like a chicken in a pot if you had to fight cooped up in a rubber uniform for more than an hour or two at a stretch?

“What do we do now?” Gruver asked, pausing to shove another clip into hisGewehr

98.

“As soon as we’ve thrown all the gas we brought, we get out,” Anielewicz answered. “The longer we hang around, the better the chance the Lizards will capture some of us, and we don’t want that.”

Gruver nodded. “If we can, we have to bring our dead away, too,” he said. “I don’t know how smart the Lizards are about these things, but if they’re smart enough, they can figure out we’re not really Nazis.”

“There is that,” Mordechai agreed. The last time he’d been reminded of the obvious difference, Zofia Klopotowski had thought it was funny. Consequences springing from it would be a lot more serious here.

The catapult-propelled bottles of nerve gas had a couple of advantages over more conventional artillery: neither muzzle flash nor noise gave away the positions of the launchers. Their crews kept flinging bottles till they were all gone.