Striking the Balance

From behind a barn, a machine gun started chattering, kicking up clumps of snow. TheWehrmacht men out in the open dove for whatever cover they could find. Two panzers fired high-explosive shells at the barn to flush out the Lizards in back of it. Not ten seconds later, one of those panzers brewed up, flame and smoke spurting from every hatch and out the top of the cupola.

Jager’s mouth went dry. “That’s a Lizard panzer there,” he shouted into the microphone to his wireless set. It was stating the obvious-overstating the obvious-but it had to be said.

“Armor-piercing,” Gunther Grillparzer said to Karl Mehler. “Give me one of the new rounds-we’ll see what they can do.”

“If they can do anything,” Mehler said gloomily, but he slammed one of the aluminum-sabot rounds into the breach of the Panther’s long 75mm cannon. With a clang, Grillparzer closed it.

“Range?” Jager asked.

“Long, sir,” the gunner answered. “Better than fifteen hundred meters.”

Jager grunted. He didn’t see any other good hiding places for panzers ahead, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Even against the one, sending his own panzers out to flank it was more likely to get them picked off one at a time than anything else. The Lizard panzer’s turret had a powered traverse, about which Jager was fearfully jealous.

He couldn’t just sit here, either. Even if he’d bumped into the last of the Lizard rear guard, that panzer could call down artillery on his head or maybe even summon a helicopter or two. With their rockets, Lizard helicopters made nasty antipanzer weapons, and they chewed up infantry like teething biscuits.

The barn started to burn, the sole result of the high-explosive shells the Germans had thrown at it That was a break; the smoke would screen his panzers from the Lizards’ eyes, at least until they shifted position. And, set alongside his other options, flanking out the Lizard panzer didn’t look so bad after all.

He was off to the right of the barn. He ordered out a Tiger from off to the left and a Panzer IV from right out in front That done, he spoke to the driver of his own machine: “Come on, Hans-time to earn our pay. Forward!”

“Jawoh!”Johannes Drucker sped out into the open country. The Panzer IV fired at the Lizard panzer. Its gun wasn’t much worse than the Panther’s, but at long range its odds of doing anything useful were slim indeed.

A shell knocked down a tree behind the Panzer IV. When the Lizards missed, it was commonly because they couldn’t see well. Their panzer did move out into the open. The Tiger fired at it. The 88 scored a clean hit, but the Lizard panzer kept moving. It was unfair, how tough they were.

The cannon in that panzer spoke. The Tiger’s turret flew off, shells inside exploding as it crashed to the ground five or six meters away from the stricken panzer. The chassis burned merrily, too. All five crewmen had to be dead. An infantryman fired an antipanzer rocket at the Lizard machine. He hit it right in the glacis plate, but the Lizard panzer’s frontal armor-from what Jager had heard, it wasn’t just steel-defeated the shaped-charge warhead. The machine gun kept searching for Germans on foot.

“Range?” Jager said again.

“Down under five hundred meters, sir,” Gunther Grillparzer answered.

“Driver halt,” Jager said, and then, “Fire!”

Because he was still standing up in the cupola rather than sheltered in the turret, the noise was like the end of the world. A tongue of flame spurted from the cannon’s muzzle.

Flame and smoke spurted from the Lizard panzer, too. “Hit!” everybody in Jager’s panzer screamed together. Jager listened to the breech clang shut on another round. The long 75mm gun bellowed again-another hit. Hatches popped open in the Lizard machine. The Panther’s hull-mounted machine gun started barking in short, precise bursts. In moments, the three Lizards who’d bailed out lay motionless on the ground, their all too humanly red blood staining the snow. Their panzer kept on burning.

Very seriously, Gunther Grillparzer said, “Sir, this is good ammunition. We can get good use from it.”

“Even if it looks funny?” Jager teased.

“Even so.”

The west wind brought the yellow dust of the Gobi with it. The dust left a thin film over everything; you could taste it if you smacked your lips a couple of times. Nieh Ho-T’ing was used to it. It came with life in and around Peking.

Major Mon rubbed at his eyes. The dust bothered him. In fair Chinese, he asked Nieh, “So-what do you want from me now? More timers? I hear you did well with the last batch.”

“No, not this time,” Nieh answered. His first thought was that the Japanese major was a fool if he thought a trick would work against the Lizards twice running. But the eastern devil could not have been a fool, not if he’d kept his force in being this long even with the Lizards, the People’s Liberation Army, the troops loyal to the Kuomintang reactionary clique, and the Chinese peasantry all arrayed against him.