Striking the Balance

Other panzers of the regiment were also blasting away at any Lizard targets they could find. Infantrymen lurked among trees and in ruined buildings, waiting with their rocket launchers to assail Lizard armor. Lizard foot soldiers had been doing that to German panzers since the invasion began. Having the wherewithal to return the compliment was enjoyable.

Overhead, artillery shells made freight-train noises as they came down on the Lizards. TheWehrmacht had pushed the line several kilometers eastward over the past couple of days. The Lizards didn’t seem to have been looking for an attack north of Lodz, and Jager’s losses, though still dreadful, were lighter than they might have been.

“I hope they’re good and bloody well diverted,” he muttered under his breath. He hadn’t been much better prepared to make the attack than the Lizards were to receive it. How well he succeeded was for all practical purposes irrelevant, anyhow. As long as the Lizards paid full attention to him, he was doing his job.

Very quietly, down to the south, Otto Skorzeny was smuggling an atomic bomb into Lodz. Jager didn’t know just how the SS man and his chums were doing it. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want them to do it, either, but he had no say about that.

He wondered if he’d managed to get word into the city. The fellow he’d contacted didn’t seem nearly so reliable as Karol: he was furtive and frightened, half rabbit, half weasel. He was also alive, however, a good reason to prefer him to the late farmer.

Gunther Grillparzer made a disgusted noise. “They aren’t rushing up to skewer themselves on our guns, the way they used to,” he said. “Took ’em long enough to learn, didn’t it? The British were quicker, down in North Africa. Hell, even the Russians were quicker, and that’s saying something.”

Off to the right, a Lizard antipanzer rocket got a Panzer IV between concealed firing positions. It brewed up, flame spurting from every hatch and a perfect black smoke ring shooting out through the open cupola. None of the five crewmen escaped.

Then Lizard artillery started landing around the German panzers. Jager considered that a signal to halt the attack for the day. The Lizards weren’t so prodigal in their use of the special shells that spat mines as they had been when the war was new, but they did still throw them about from time to time. He didn’t care to lose half a company’s worth of panzers to blown tracks.

The men were just as glad to bivouac. As Gunther Grillparzer got a little cookflre going, he turned to Johannes Drucker and asked, “Ever get the feeling you’ve lived too long already?”

“Don’t talk like a dumbhead,” the driver answered. “You just had a goose walk over your grave, that’s all.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Grillparzer said. “I hope so. Jesus, though, every time we fight the Lizards, I don’t believe I’m going to come through in one piece.”

Otto Skorzeny had a way of materializing out of thin air, like a genie from theArabian Nights.

“You’re a young man yet,” he said. “One piece a day shouldn’t be enough to satisfy you.”

“I didn’t expect to see you here so soon,” Jager said as the panzer crewmen snickered.

“Hell, don’t give me that-you didn’t expect to see me at all,” Skorzeny said with a laugh. “But I needed to give you the news and I couldn’t very well put it on the wireless, sohier steh’ ich- here I stand.” He struck a pose perhaps meant to be clerical. Jager was hard-pressed to imagine anyone who seemed less like Martin Luther. The SS man nudged him. They walked away from the cookflre and the big, friendly bulk of the Panther. In a low voice, Skorzeny went on, “It’s in place.”

“I figured it had to be,” Jager answered. “Otherwise you’d still be down in Lodz. But how the devil did you manage it?”

“We have our methods,” Skorzeny said, not sounding much like Sherlock Holmes, either. “Enough ginger for the Lizards, enough gold pieces for the Poles.” He laughed. “Some of them may even live to spend their loot-but not many.” Merely being himself, he was as frightening a man as Jager had ever known.

“When does it go off?” he asked.

“When I get orders to touch it off,” Skorzeny said. “Now that it’s in place, all my chums in the fancy black uniforms will go on home. It’ll be my show. And do you know what?” He waited for Jager to shake his head before continuing, “I’m really looking forward to it, too.”

No, he was never more frightening than when he sounded like Skorzeny.

The rubble behind which Mutt Daniels sprawled had once been the chimney to a prosperous farmhouse about halfway between Marblehead and Fall Creek, Illinois. He glanced over to Herman Muldoon, who was sprawled behind some more of those red bricks. “We don’t go forward any way a-tall,” he said, “we don’t clear the Lizards off the Mississippi till the weekafter Judgment Day.”

“Yeah,” Muldoon agreed mournfully. “They don’t much want to be moved, do they?”