Striking the Balance

Jager glanced around the rest of the panzer crewmen. Nobody disagreed with him, not out loud, but nobody sprang up to say anything nice about the Jews in the Lodz ghetto. That worried Jager. He wasn’t massively enamored of Jews himself, but he’d been horrflied when he learned what German forces had done to them in the areas theReich had conquered. He hadn’t wanted to learn about such things, but he’d had his nose rubbed in them, and he was not the sort of man who could pretend he was blind when be wasn’t. A lot of German officers, he’d found to his dismay, had no trouble at all managing that.

Right this second, though, he didn’t have to think about it “Let’s share out what they’ve brought us,” he told his men. “If all you’ve got is a dead pig, you eat pork chops.”

“This stuff is liable to turn us all into dead pigs,” Karl Mehler muttered under his breath, but that didn’t keep him from taking his fair share of the newfangled rounds. He stowed them in the Panther’s ammunition bins. “It doesn’t look right,” he grumbled when he scrambled back out of the panzer. “It looks funny. We’ve never had anything like it before.”

“Intelligence says one of the reasons we drive the Lizards crazy is that we keep coming up with new things,” Jager said. “They don’t change, or don’t change much. Do you want to be like them?”

“Well, no, sir, but I don’t want to change for the worse, either, and not for the hell of it,” Mehler said. “These things look like a sausage sticking out of a bun, like some engineer is having a joke with us.”

“They don’t pay off on looks,” Jager answered. “If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, then somebody’s head rolls. First, though, we have to find out.”

“If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, our heads roll,” Karl Mehler said. “Maybe somebody else’s head rolls afterwards, but we won’t get to watch that.”

Since Mehler was right, the only thing Jager could do was glare at him. With a shrug, the loader climbed back into the turret. A moment later, Gunther Grillparzer followed him. Jager climbed in, too, and flipped up the lid to the cupola so he could stand up and see what he was doing. The driver, Johannes Drucker, and the hull gunner, Bernhard Steinfeldt, took their positions at the front of the Panther’s fighting compartment.

The big Maybach petrol engine started up. Steam and stinking exhaust roared from the tailpipe. All through the clearing, Panthers, Tigers, and Panzer IVs were coming to life. Jager really thought of it that way: they seemed like so many dinosaurs exhaling on a cold winter’s morning.

Drucker rocked the Panther back and forth, going from low gear to reverse and back, to break up the ice that accumulated overnight between the panzer’s interleaved road wheels. That freeze-up problem was the only drawback to the suspension; it gave a smooth ride over rugged terrain. But sometimes even rocking the panzer wouldn’t free up the road wheels. Then you had to light a fire to melt the ice before you could get going. If the enemy attacked you instead of the other way around, that could prove hazardous to your life expectancy.

But today, the Germans were hunters, not hunted-at least for the moment. The panzers rolled out of the clearing. With them came a few self-propelled guns and a couple of three-quarter-tracked carriers full of infantrymen. Some of the foot soldiers carried hand-held antipanzer rockets-another idea stolen from the Lizards. Jager thought about remarking on that to his crewmen, but decided not to bother. They were doing fine as things stood.

Against the Poles, against the French, against the Russians, theWehrmacht

panzers had charged out ahead of the infantry, cutting great gaps in the forces of the enemy. Do that against the Lizards and your head would roll, sure as sure. The only way you had any hope of shifting them was with a combined-arms operation-and even then, you’d better outnumber them.

Jager would have been just as well content to find no trace of the aliens. He knew how many times he’d been lucky. Christ crucflied, he’d killed a Lizard panzer with the 50mm gun of a Panzer III back in the days when the Lizards had just come to Earth, and if that wasn’t luck, he didn’t know what was. And here he was, almost two years later, still alive and still unmaimed. Not many who’d seen as much action could say the same.

Up ahead, the trees thinned out. He got on the all-vehicles wireless circuit. “We’ll halt at the forest’s edge to reconnoiter.” Charge out into open country and you deserved to get slaughtered.

Foot soldiers in winter white got down from their carriers and trotted ghostlike out across the snow-covered fields. A couple of them had rocket launchers (also whitewashed) on their backs; the rest carried MP-40 submachine guns. Jager had heard Hugo Schmeisser wasn’t involved with the design of that weapon, but it got called a Schmeisser just the same.