Upsetting the Balance w-3 Read online

  “Sir?” Yeager did his best to keep the surprise-to say nothing of the dismay-he felt from showing. His best, he feared, was none too good. He figured he’d better explain: “They shoot down an awful lot of our planes, sir.” That would do for an understatement until a better one came along. The Lizards’ aircraft had the same sort of advantage against the planes the Americans flew as a Lightning or a Warhawk would have against a World War I-vintage Sopwith Camel.

  But Groves nodded his big head and said, “You’ll fly anyhow-and what’s more, the Lizards will know you’re coming.” Yeager must have looked as if he’d just been smacked in the kisser with a large carp, for the general chuckled a little before continuing, “We always inform them before we move prisoners by air, and we paint the planes we fly them in bright yellow. It’s worked pretty well; they don’t like shooting at their own people any more than we would.”

  “Oh,” Yeager said. “I guess that’s okay, then.” And if there were no such arrangement between Lizards and men and Groves had told him to fly anyway, he’d have damn well flown: that’s what the Army was about. As it was, though, he asked, “Do you think it’s safe enough for my wife to come along, sir? Really, I’m not just asking for the sake of having her with me; she knows just about as much about the Lizards as I do. She’d be useful at this Arkansas place, at least until she has her baby.”

  “Under normal circumstances, Sergeant, I’d say no,” Groves answered. He grimaced. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as normal circumstances any more. As you say, your Barbara may be useful in Arkansas, but that’s not why I’m going to tell you yes. Frankly, Sergeant, getting you and her out of here will simplify matters when Professor Larssen gets back from Washington State.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sam said woodenly. Groves had to think like that, though; Jens Larssen was a talented nuclear physicist, and the general was running a project to build an atomic bomb. If he could help the Lizard prisoner research project at the same time…two birds with one stone ran through Yeager’s mind. “When do we leave, sir?” he asked.

  “Not for a few days,” Groves answered. “We need to make the arrangements and be sure they’re understood. Written orders will go out to you as soon as one of the secretaries gets around to typing them. Dismissed.”

  Yeager stood, saluted, and left. He wasn’t sure Groves even saw the salute; he’d already gotten back to work on the report he’d been scribbling on when Sam came in.

  Barbara, Ullhass, and Ristin all took a couple of steps toward him when he came out into the hallway. “You look green, Sam,” she said. “What happened in there?”

  “Pack your bags, hon,” he answered. “We’re moving to Arkansas.” She stared and stared. He had to remind himself that she’d never been traded before.

  Heinrich Jager stuck his head and torso up through the open cupola of his Panzer V for a look around, then ducked back down into the turret of the panzer. “Lord, it feels good to have some centimeters of steel all the way around me again,” he said.

  His gunner, a veteran sergeant named Klaus Meinecke, grunted at that. “Colonel, you don’t seem to have done too bad while you were out on your own, either.” He pointed to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross that Jager wore at his collar.

  Jager’s hand went to the medal. He’d earned it for helping Otto Skorzeny take the town of Split on the Adriatic back from the Lizards. He said, “Sergeant, I was in the infantry during the last war. I thought one round of that had cured me forever. Just goes to show, you may get older, but you don’t get smarter.”

  Meinecke laughed as if he’d told a joke. But Jager meant every word of it. Fighting from building to building inside the great stone walls of Diocletian’s palace had been every bit as appalling as trench warfare in France a quarter of a century before.

  The Alsatian town of Rouffach, through which the Panther had rumbled a few minutes before, had been part of the GermanReich during World War I, taken from France after the Franco-Prussian War. France had taken it back after the First World War; now it was German again… for as long as theReich could maintain itself against the Lizards.

  Jager stood up in the cupola again, looked back over his shoulder. The spires of Rouffach’s church of Notre Dame still loomed against the sky; so did what the locals called the Witches’ Tower, crowned by a huge, disorderly storks’ nest. “Pretty country,” he said, lowering himself once more.

  Klaus Meinecke grunted. “I wouldn’t know. All I get to see of it is a gunsight’s worth, except when we stop for the night.” He smacked his lips. “They make good wine around here, though; I’ll give them that much.”

  “That they do,” Jager said. “They didn’t do badly farther south, either.”

  He wouldn’t let himself venture any more in the way of reproach than that. When he’d left the panzer forces in the west to head for Croatia, they’d had the Lizards stopped in their tracks between Besancon and Belfort. Since then, Belfort had fallen, and Mulhouse, too; the Lizards had pushed all the way up to the Rhine.If I’d been here… Jager thought, and then shook his head. Almost certainly, the same thing would have happened. He knew he was a damn fine panzer officer. He also knew he wasn’t a panzer genius-and even a panzer genius might not have held the Lizards once they got rolling.

  “Maybe we can push them out of Mulhouse again,” he said hopefully.

  “That’s what they said we’d do back in Colmar, anyhow,” Meinecke answered. He was a veteran, all right; he understood that what they said and what actually happened could be two very different animals. He pursed his lips, then added quietly, as if afraid of being overheard by malignant fate, “Engine’s been behaving pretty well, knock wood.” He made a fist and tapped it against the side of his own head.

  “Let’s hope it keeps up,” Jager agreed. Rushed into production, the Panther could be balky; among other things, fuel pump problems plagued it. But it was a great step forward from earlier German panzers, boasting a high-velocity 75mm gun and thick, well-sloped armor borrowed in concept from that of the Soviet T-34.

  All of which meant you only had to be foolhardy to go up against the Lizards in a Panther, as opposed to clinically insane, which was about what opposing them in a Panzer III had required.

  “Wish we had one of those bombs the Russians used to blow the Lizards to hell and gone,” Meinecke said. “When do you suppose we’ll get one of our own?”

  “Damned if I know,” Jager said. “I wish to God I did.”

  “If you don’t, who does?” the gunner asked.

  Now Jager just grunted by way of reply. He wasn’t supposed to say anything about that to anybody. He’d been part of the band of raiders that had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in Russia-like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods,said the part of him that, back before World War I, had planned on becoming a classical archaeologist. He’d taken Germany’s share of the material across Poland on horseback, only to have half of it hijacked by Jewish fighters there.

  Only luck they didn’t kill me and take it all,he thought. In Russia and then in Poland, he’d learned what theReich had done to the Jews who’d fallen into their hands; it made him sick, so he understood why the Polish Jews had risen in favor of the Lizards and against their German overlords.

  He’d also been involved in the German physicists’ efforts to build an atomic pile at Hechingen, although, again luckily, he’d been in combat in eastern France when the pile went out of control somehow and killed off a good many physicists, including Werner Heisenberg. How long the program would take to recover was anyone’s guess.

  Meanwhile, the unglamorous infantry and panzer troops would have to keep the Lizards from overrunning theVaterland. If they didn’t, the high foreheads would never get the chance to finish their research and make something that would goboom! In Hechingen, Jager had felt useless; he’d been too ignorant to contribute properly. Now he was back to doing what he did best.

  Off to one side of the road, an artillery piece barked, then another and
another. “Eighty-eights,” Jager said, identifying them by the report. “That’s good.”

  Meinecke understood him without any more discussion than that: “So they can fire their salvo and then get the hell out of there, you mean?”

  “Right the first time, Sergeant. They’re easy to shift to a new firing position-a lot easier than the bigger guns.” Jager paused meditatively. “And Lizard counterbattery fire is better than anything we ever dreamt of.”

  “Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, sir?” Meinecke agreed with a mournful sigh. “They can drive nails into your coffin from halfway round the world, seems like sometimes. If there were more of them, and if they had the doctrine to go with all their fancy equipment-”

  “-The likes of us would have been dead for quite a while now,” Jager finished for him. Meinecke laughed, though again the colonel had spoken nothing but the truth. Down lower in the turret, Wolfgang Eschenbach, the loader, laughed, too. He was a big blond farm boy; getting more than half a dozen words out of him in the course of a day was just this side of miraculous.

  For all their good points, 88s had drawbacks, too. They couldn’t fire shells as heavy as the larger guns, and they couldn’t throw the shells they did fire as far. That meant-

  “We’ll probably see action in the next few kilometers,” Jager said.

  “Bumping up against whatever the artillery boys are shooting at, you mean, sir?” Meinecke said. At Jager’s nod, he went on, “Makes sense to me. Besides, south of Rouffach is where they told us we’d start running into the enemy, isn’t it? They have to be right once in a while.”

  “Your confidence in the High Command does you credit, Sergeant,” Jager said dryly, which set the gunner and the loader to laughing again. “I just hope the Lizards use the same kind of flank guards we did when we got stretched thin fighting the Russians.”

  “How’s that,Herr Oberst?” Meinecke asked. “Me, I was playing games with the Tommies in the desert before they stuck me in the Flying Circus here.” When Panther and Tiger panzers started rolling off the assembly lines, theWehrmacht put only the best crewmen into them.

  “You, you didn’t miss a thing,” Jager said, mimicking his gunner’s diction. “But sometimes we’d have to concentrate our German troops at theSchwerpunkt, the decisive place, and cover our flanks with Romanians or Hungarians or Italians.”

  “God save us.” Wolfgang Eschenbach used up half his daily quota of speech.

  “They weren’t the worst soldiers I’ve ever seen,” Jager said. “They might not have been bad at all if they were decently equipped. But sometimes the Russians managed to hit them instead of us, and it got pretty ugly. I’m hoping the Lizards are concentrating all their best troops up where they’re trying to advance. I’d just as soon not have to fight the first team all the time.”

  “Amen to that,” Eschenbach said; Jager confidently expected him to fall silent till the morning.

  The colonel stood up in the cupola again. That was a good way to get shot, but it was also far and away the best way to see what was going on, and if you didn’t know what was going on, you had no business commanding a panzer, let alone a (rather battered) regiment of them. Slamming the lid down and peering through the periscopes made you feel safer, but it also made you miss things that were liable to get you killed.

  Northbound shells whistled overhead, undoubtedly the Lizards’ response to the Germans’ 88s. Jager hoped the artillerymen had moved their pieces elsewhere before the shells came down on them.

  The countryside began to have the look of a land at war: wrecked and burned farm buildings, smashed trees, bloated dead animals, shell craters pocking fields. Jager clucked sadly at the charred wreck of a German half-track. The Panther rolled past trenches and foxholes that showed the earlier limits of the German push to the south.

  Stooping to get down into the turret for a moment, Jager said, “We’re moving forward, anyhow.” Against the Lizards, that was no small novelty, and boosted his hopes that they had only second-line troops on their flanks. Like a jack-in-the-box, he popped up out of the cupola again.

  Through the rasping roar of the Panther’s big Maybach engine came the rattle of small-arms fire ahead. A couple of German MG42s were in action, their rapid rate of fire unmistakable-they sounded as if a giant were ripping enormous bolts of thick, tough cloth between his hands. Jager was glad the German infantry had the machine guns; since all Lizard foot soldiers carried automatic weapons, the poorLandsers needed all the help they could get.

  The German panzers deployed for action, moving into their blunt wedge formation: two companies forward, Jager’s command panzer and another company in the middle to support them, and a fourth company in the rear as a reserve. They chewed brown, muddy lines through the green of growing crops.

  Without warning, a streak of fire lanced through the air toward a Panzer IV in one of the lead companies. New Panzer IVs had long-barreled 75mm guns almost as good as the ones Panthers carried, but their armor, though thicker than in the earlier models, wasn’t excellent protection even against terrestrial foes. Against a Lizard anti-panzer rocket, the armor might as well not have been there at all. The Panzer IV brewed up, orange flame billowing and a column of thick black smoke mounting swiftly into the air.

  Confused, angry shouts filled the radio. Jager grabbed the headset, shoved the earphones into place, and shouted orders into the microphone. The nearest surviving panzer poured machine-gun fire into the thick clump of bushes from which the anti-panzer rocket had come, hoping to flush out or knock down the Lizards who had fired it.

  Nothing without armor could have survived that hail of bullets. From more than four hundred meters farther to the rear, Jager watched the bushes writhe under it, as if under torture. But a moment later, another rocket incinerated a German panzer.

  “They’ve got one of their troop carriers in there!” Jager shouted into the microphone. “Give ’em your main armament.” Unlike German half-tracks, the Lizards’ armored troop carriers bore light cannon that could chew up anything this side of a panzer, and carried those rockets on turret rails to either side of the cannon. With them, the troop carriers became deadly dangerous panzer killers.

  But, while they were formidably armed, they were only lightly armored. They could withstand small-arms fire, but when a panzer shell came knocking, they opened up. The German panzer hit the brakes to fire into that stand of bushes. Moments later, the bushes went up in flames as part of the troop carrier’s funeral pyre.

  Jager whooped like a Red Indian. He remembered all too well the bad days of the summer before, when killing any Lizard armored vehicle seemed to require divine intervention. He’d done it himself once, with the 50mm cannon of a Panzer III, but he didn’t pretend he’d been anything but lucky.

  Yet another rocket streaked out from cover and smote a Panzer IV. The rocket exploded in a ball of flame, but the panzer did not brew up. Jager whooped again. “TheSchurzen work!” he shouted to the world at large. The hollow-charge warheads of the Lizards’ anti-panzer rockets sent a jet of white-hot flame through armor and into a panzer. Some bright engineer had figured out that 5mm plates-“skirts,” he called them-welded onto a panzer’s turret and sides would make the rocket warhead go off prematurely and dissipate that jet. Now Jager saw that the bright idea actually worked in combat.

  The advancing German panzers kept on spraying the Lizard infantry positions with machine-gun bullets. Covered by that, German infantrymen ran forward, too. The only opposing fire came from small arms. Jager’s hopes rose, if the Lizards didn’t have any panzers in this sector, theWehrmacht really could make some gains. He hadn’t taken the brass seriously when they talked about getting Mulhouse back and cutting the Lizards off from the Rhine, but he was starting to think that just might happen.

  Then three Lizard helicopters popped up from behind cover, two from out of clearings in the woods and the third from behind a barn. Jager’s mouth went dry; helicopters were deadlier foes than panzers. They launched t
wo rockets each. One blew a hole in the ground. The other five hit German panzers. Two of the machines survived, but the other three went up in flames. A couple of crewmen managed to bail out of escape hatches; most perished.

  Then 20mm rapid-fire antiaircraft guns started hammering at the helicopters. On the raid that captured the plutonium from the Lizards, the Germans who’d joined with the Russian partisans had carried a mountain version of one of those guns, which broke down into man-portable loads. Now theWehrmacht made a habit of posting the light guns as far forward as possible, to hold helicopters at bay.

  The tactic worked. The helicopters sheered away from the antiaircraft guns. One of them was trailing smoke, though it kept flying. Jager prayed for it to fall from the sky, but it refused.

  The two lead panzer companies were already through what had been the Lizards’ front line. They hadn’t cleared up all the holdouts; a bullet cracked past Jager’s head and several more ricocheted off the Panther. Like any sensible soldiers, the Lizards were trying to pick off the panzer commanders. For the time being, Jager ducked down into the Panther turret.

  “We’re driving them,” he said, fixing his eyes to the periscopes that gave him vision even when buttoned up. “With luck, maybe we can push far enough to get in among their artillery and do them some real harm.”

  Just then a Lizard troop carrier that had lain low opened up with a rocket and took out a panzer less than a hundred meters from Jager’s. By luck, he was looking through the periscope that showed where the rocket had come from. “Panzer halt!” he shouted, and then, “Armor-piercing!”

  “Armor-piercing.” Wolfgang Eschenbach had a dispensation to exceed his daily word quota if in the line of duty. Grunting a little, he lifted a black-tipped shell and set it in the breech of the Panther’s cannon.

  “Bearing three hundred degrees, range seven hundred meters, maybe a little less,” Jager said.

  The turret slewed anticlockwise. “I see him, sir,” Klaus Meinecke said. “Behind those bushes,ja?”