Striking the Balance

Jager stared down at the jackbooted ignoramus in silent scorn. Take his words to the logical extreme and you’d turn theWehrmacht into a bunch of automata as inflexible as the Russians or the Lizards. If you got orders that made no sense, you questioned them. If they still didn’t make sense, or if they led you into an obvious catastrophe, you ignored them.

You needed guts to do it. You put your career on the line when you disobeyed orders. But if you could convince your superiors you’d been right, or that the orders you’d got showed no real understanding of the situation in front of you, you’d survive. You might even get promoted.

Jager, now, hadn’t just disobeyed orders. If you wanted to look at things in a particular light, he’d given aid and comfort to the enemy. Any SS man who found out about what he’d done would look at it in that particular light.

For his part, he studied the weedy little fellow standing there beside Skorzeny. Had he dropped his pants and enjoyed himself with Karol’s wife, or maybe with his young daughter, while a couple of others held her down? Was he the one who’d carved SS runes into the Polish farmer’s belly? And what, in his agony, had Karol said? Was this smiling chap just waiting for the bomb to go off before he arrested Jager and started carving runes into him?

Skorzeny glanced down at his wristwatch. “Soon now,” he said. “When it goes up, we move, and the signal goes out to our armies on the other fronts, too. The Lizards will be sorry they didn’t give in to our demands.”

“Yes, and what happens afterwards?” Jager asked as he had before, still hoping he could talk Skorzeny out of pushing the fateful button. “We can be sure the Lizards will destroy at least one city of the GermanReich. They’ve done that every time anyone used an explosive-metal bomb against them in war. But this isn’t just war-it’s breaking a cease-fire. Aren’t they liable to do something worse?”

“I don’t know,” Skorzeny said cheerfully. “And you know what else? I don’t give a fuck, either. We’ve been over this ground already. The job theFuhrer’s

given me is kicking the Lizards and the Jews in the balls, just as hard as I can. That’s what I’m going to do, too. Whatever happens afterwards, it damn well happens, that’s all, and I’ll worry about it then.”

“That is the National Socialist way of thought,” the other SS man declared, beaming at Skorzeny.

Skorzeny wasn’t looking back on him. TheStandartenfuhrer’s eyes were on Jager instead, up there in the cupola (the engineers and mechanics had been right-it was a vastly improved cupola) of the Panther. Without giving his black-shirted colleague a hint of what he was thinking, he made his opinion plain to the panzer colonel. If it wasn’t,What a load of pious crap, Jager would have eaten his service cap.

And yet, even if Skorzeny didn’t give a damn about the slogans under which he fought, they remained valid for him. Hitler flew him like a falcon at chosen foes. And, like a falcon, he didn’t worry about where he was flying or for what reasons, only about how to strike the hardest blow when he got there.

That wasn’t enough.

Jager had fought the same way himself, till he’d had his eyes forcibly opened to what Germany had done to the Jews in the lands it had overrun, and to what it would have done had the arrival of the Lizards not interrupted things. Once your eyes were opened, shutting them again wasn’t easy. Jager had tried, and failed.

He’d also-cautiously-tried to open the eyes of some other officers, Skorzeny among them. Without exception, everybody else had stayed willfully blind, not wanting to see, not wanting to discuss. He understood that. He even sympathized with itif

you refused to notice the flaws of your superiors and your country, you could go on about your daily routine a lot more easily.

As long as he was fighting just the Lizards, Jager had no trouble suppressing his own doubts, his own worries. Nobody could doubt for even a moment that the Lizards were deadly foes not only to Germany but to all mankind. You did what you had to do to stop them. But the explosive-metal bomb in Lodz didn’t have only the Lizards in mind. It didn’t even have the Lizards primarily in mind. Skorzeny knew as much. He’d set it there after the nerve-gas bomb he’d intended for the Jews of Lodz failed. It was his-and Germany’s-revenge on the Jews for thwarting him once.

Try as Jager would, he couldn’t stomach that.

Skorzeny walked away, whistling. When he came back, he was wearing a pack like the one a wireless operator carried. In fact, it undoubtedly was a wireless operator’s pack. The handset that went with it, though, was anything but standard issue. It had only two elements: a bar switch and a large red button.

“I make the time 1100 hours,” Skorzeny said after yet another glance at his watch.

The other SS man brought his right wrist up toward his face. “I confirm the time as 1100 hours,” he said formally.