Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance Page 5

  Jäger 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. Jäger whooped again. “The Schürzen 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 Jäger 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. Jäger’s hopes rose, if the Lizards didn’t have any panzers in this sector, the Wehrmacht 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. Jäger’s mouth went dry; helicopters were deadlier foes than panzers. They launched two 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 the Wehrmacht 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. Jäger 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 Jäger’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, Jäger 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 Jäger’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,” Jäger said.

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

  “That’s the one,” Jäger said. “Fire at—”

  Before he could say “will,” Meinecke fired. With the turret closed, the noise was bearable, but recoil rocked the Panther. The shell casing leaped out of the breech; Eschenbach had to move smartly to keep it from mashing his toes. The acrid reek of burnt cordite filled the air.

  “Hit!” Jäger yelled. “Hit! Got him in one, Klaus. Forward!” That to the driver; stopped, the Panther was hideously vulnerable to enemy fire. The Maybach bellowed. The panzer leaped ahead. The advance went on.

  2

  Captain Rance Auerbach led his cavalry company out of Syracuse, Kansas, heading east along the north bank of the Arkansas River toward Garden City. Somewhere before he got there, he expected to run into the Lizards.

  People in Syracuse waved to him and his command. Like him, they were up with the sun. Most of them were heading out to their farms. “God bless you, boys,” a man in overalls called. “Give ’em hell,” somebody else said. Two people said, “Be careful.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Auerbach said, brushing the brim of his hat with the forefinger of his right hand. He was a big, rawboned man; years out in the open in all weather had tanned and lined his long face till he looked a good deal older than his actual thirty-two. That was true of most of the farmers, too, but amid their flat Kansas accents his Texas drawl stood out like a bobcat in a pack of coyotes.

  His second-in-command, Lieutenant Bill Magruder, came out of Virginia and had a softer version of a Southern accent. “So’t of hate to leave a nice little town like this,” he remarked.

  “It is pretty, isn’t it?” Auerbach said. Syracuse boasted a cool, green profusion of poplars, willows, and other trees. On this stretch of the Great Plains, there wasn’t much like it. Folks drove from miles around to relax under those trees. Or rather, folks had driven, in the days before the Lizards came.

  “Your grandfather ride this way during the States War?” Magruder asked.

  “Two of my great-grandfathers were Texas cavalrymen, sure enough,” Auerbach answered. “One of ’em did some fighting in the Indian Territory—what’s Oklahoma now—and up in Missouri, so I reckon he went through Kansas a time or two, but probably not this far west. Wasn’t anything here to speak of back then.”

  “Mm, you’re likely right,” Magruder said.

  They rode on a while in silence punctuated only by the occasional jingle of harness and the steady clopping of their horses’ hooves. A little to the north, US 50 paralleled the Arkansas, but bare ground was easier on the horses’ feet and legs than the asphalt would have been.

  Every few hundred yards, a dead car or a clump of them sat on or alongside the highway. Some had just run out of gas with no hope for getting more. The Lizards had strafed others in the early days of their invasion, back when their fighter planes roamed everywhere and shot up everything. Farther east along the road, there would be dead tanks, too. The Great Plains were wonderful country for armor, too bad the Lizards had the wonderful armor to take advantage of the terrain.

  “Or maybe it’s not too bad,” Auerbach murmured, leaning forward to pat the side of his gelding’s neck. “Otherwise you’d be out of a job and I’d be just another grease monkey.”

  The horse snorted softly. Auerbach patted it again, if you sent cavalry charging tanks, the way the Poles had against the Nazis in 1939, you’d get yourself killed, but you wouldn’t accomplish anything else. But if you used your horses to take you to places farther and faster than infantry could go, and if you made sure the garrisons you raided weren’t big ones, you could still do some useful things.

  “You know, we aren’t really cavalry, not the way Jeb Stuart would have used the word,” Auerbach said.

  “I know. We’re dragoons,” Magruder answered calmly. If anything ever rattled him, he didn’t let it show on the outside. “We use the horses to get from here to there, then get down and fight on foot. Jeb Stuart might not have done things that way, but Bedford Forrest sure as hell did.”

  “He’d have done better if he’d had our firepower, too,” Auerbach said. “Every trooper with an M-1 except for the boys with BARs, a couple of nice, light Browning 1919A2 machine guns and a mortar on our packhorses . . . give ’em to Forrest and we’d all be singin’ ‘Dixie’ instead of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

  “If Forrest had ’em, the damnyankees would’ve had ’em, too,” Magruder said. “It’d just ratchet the slaughter up a n
otch without doin’ anything else much, seems to me. Right now, I’m not much worried about what we sing for the national anthem, as long as it’s not the song the Lizards use.”

  To that, Auerbach could only nod. The company rode past the ruins of Fort Aubrey, about four miles east of Syracuse. After the Civil War, the Army had used it as a base from which to fight Indians. There hadn’t been any fighting in these parts since. There was now.

  High overhead, a westbound Lizard airplane scribed a white contrail, straight as if drawn by a draftsman, across the blue sky—a blueprint for somebody catching hell, Auerbach thought. The deadly roar of the plane’s jet engines came down to the ground as a thin, attenuated whisper.

  Bill Magruder shook his fist at the flying silver speck. Auerbach understood that only too well. He said, “I’m just glad it’s not after us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Magruder said. They’d both been through assaults by ground-attack aircraft. Those chewed up horse cavalry as bad as tanks did. Helicopters were even worse. They didn’t just make strafing runs and leave; they stayed around and hunted you no matter which way you ran. If cavalry flew instead of riding, it would be mounted on helicopters.

  Auerbach turned his head to follow the Lizard plane as it disappeared into the west. “These days, I can’t help wondering what those sons of bitches carry,” he said. “I keep worrying it’s another one of those bombs like the one they used on Washington or the Russians used on them south of Moscow. Once the gloves for that kind of fight come off, how do you put ’em back on again?”

  “Damned if I know,” Magruder answered. “I just wish to Jesus we had some of those bombs ourselves. You think we can make ’em?”

  “I sure hope so,” Auerbach answered. He thought back to the knapsack that colonel—what was his name? Groves, that was it—had toted from Boston all the way to Denver, complete with a detour into Canada. He’d commanded the company that had escorted Groves on the cross-country jaunt. He didn’t know for sure what was in that knapsack; Groves had been mighty tight-lipped about the whole business, like any good officer. But if it wasn’t something to do with one of those fancy bombs, Auerbach figured his guesser needed repairing.

  He didn’t say anything about that to Magruder, who hadn’t been with the company then. If Groves couldn’t talk to him about it, he didn’t figure he could talk to anybody else.

  The company rode into Kendall, twelve miles east of Syracuse, a couple of hours before noon. If Syracuse had been a small town, Kendall was a dusty hamlet dozing by the Arkansas River. Auerbach let the horses rest, crop some grass, and drink from the river. He walked into the general store to see if it had anything worth getting, but the 150 Kendallians had pretty much picked it clean over the past year. They were living on whatever they got from their farms, the way their grandparents and great-grandparents had just after the War Between the States.

  When the company left Kendall, Auerbach ordered a couple of scouts with radios well forward. He knew the Lizards were in Garden City, forty miles east. He didn’t think they were in Lakin, fifteen miles east. He didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.

  He also ordered the men to spread out wide. Even if the worst happened—the worst being attack from the air—some of them should escape.

  One minute, one hour, melted into another. Sweat dripped from the end of Auerbach’s pointed nose, soaked the armpits of his khaki jacket. He took off his hat and fanned himself with it. It didn’t help much.

  Just as if the world remained at peace, windmills spun, pumping water up from underground to nourish wheat and corn and sugar beets. Almost every farm had a big brooder house; every so often, Auerbach would hear chickens clucking. Cows and sheep cropped grass, while pigs wandered around eating anything that wasn’t nailed down. Even though shipping had gone to the devil here no less than anywhere else, people still ate pretty well.

  The company approached Lakin in the late afternoon. Auerbach didn’t mind that at all: if the town did hold Lizards, they’d have the sun in their eyes when fighting started. “Sir!” The radioman brought his horse up next to Auerbach’s. “Henry and Red, they say they’ve spotted razor wire like the Lizards use. They’re dismounting and they’ll wait for us.”

  “Right.” Auerbach reined in and got out a pair of binoculars. He didn’t see any razor wire, but the scouts were a lot closer than he was. Far and away the biggest set of buildings ahead looked at first distant glance like military barracks. Auerbach turned the binoculars on them, whereupon he laughed at himself—they let him read the words painted in big letters on the side of one building, which said KEARNY COUNTY CONSOLIDATED HIGH SCHOOL. He turned back to the radioman. “Tell ’em we’re on our way.”

  “Yes, sir.” The radioman spoke into the microphone.

  “Horse holders!” Auerbach called, hoping the sun would keep the Lizards in Lakin from noticing him and his men. If it didn’t, that could prove embarrassing—maybe fatally embarrassing.

  In the States War, one man in four had held horses while the others went up to fight on foot. Auerbach’s company was already about ten men understrength; he couldn’t afford to lose any more effectives than he could help. Letting one man hold five horses also let the company bring four or five extra weapons to the front.

  Some of the horse holders resented the duty; he had to rotate it through all the troopers to make it seem fair. Some, though, looked just as well pleased not to be going up against the firepower the Lizards could throw at them. He pretended not to notice that. Nobody had to be a hero all the time.

  He wondered how big a garrison the Lizards had thrown into Lakin. They hadn’t been there long; how well could they have fortified the place? He was bringing about seventy men with him; if they were going up against a battalion, they’d get slaughtered. But why in God’s name would the Lizards stick a battalion into a godforsaken place like Lakin, Kansas? He hoped he wouldn’t find out.

  The company advanced at the best pace the crews for the machine guns and mortar could manage: they were the ones weighed down by their guns and ammunition. Auerbach would have liked to approach Lakin closer on horseback, but that was asking to get chewed up. Here on the plains, they could see you coming from a long way off.

  About a mile outside of town, the mortar crew set up shop. A little bit closer, Red and Henry had tied their horses to fence posts. Red—his last name was O’Neill—pointed ahead. “See that, sir? They’ve got a perimeter out around the school.”

  “Mmhmm.” Auerbach studied it. “Wire, yeah, and firing pits, too. I don’t see anybody in ’em, though.”

  “No, sir,” O’Neill agreed. “They’re there, all right, but they don’t look like they’re expecting company.”

  “Which may mean they aren’t, and which may mean they’re laying for us.” Auerbach rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped under his fingers. He was getting scruffy enough to make a good States War trooper, that was for sure. He sighed. “I think we better find out.”

  Nobody argued, but then nobody would; he was the captain, the fellow who got paid to make the choices. He wished someone would have tried to talk him out of this one. Instead, the men fanned out and started moving in on the consolidated high school. At his murmured orders, one of the machine-gun crews went straight toward it while the other circled around to the left, away from the Arkansas River.

  Auerbach went straight in, too. With every step he took, he wished Kansas wasn’t so blinking flat. He felt like a bug on a plate, walking toward a man with a fly swatter the size of Dallas. Before long, he wasn’t walking any more; he was crawling on his belly through the grass.

  Something moved inside the perimeter ahead. Auerbach froze. Somebody fired. As if that were a signal, the whole company opened up. Some of the high school’s windows had been broken before. Abruptly, just about all of them were.

  The Lizards wasted no time shooting back. They had machine guns on the roofs of several high school buildings. Auerbach blew air out through his lips, making a snuffling noise
amazingly like one a horse might produce. This wasn’t going to be anything like a walkover.

  A mortar bomb whistled through the air, landing about fifty yards short of the school buildings. Another round flew over the high school. Bracketed, Auerbach thought. Then bombs started falling on the buildings. One of the rooftop machine guns suddenly fell silent. Auerbach yelled himself hoarse.

  After about fifteen rounds, the mortar stopped shooting. That was painfully developed doctrine. If you kept banging away from the same place too long, the Lizards would get you. Besides, they were going to be calling in air support any minute now. You didn’t want to lose artillery, even a little old mortar. If they couldn’t find you, they couldn’t shoot you.

  One of the high school buildings had caught fire. Lizards skittered out of it. Auerbach drew a bead on one, fired. The Lizard sprawled on the ragged grass and lay there kicking. Auerbach shot at another one, to no visible effect. He swore.

  Some of his men had got into Lakin itself, so fire came at the consolidated high school from three sides of a ring. Auerbach pricked up his ears—some of the weapons firing from, that direction weren’t regulation Army issue. That meant the locals had joined in the fight. Auerbach wanted to pound his head against the dirt of the shallow foxhole he’d scraped out for himself. The cavalry was going to have to get the hell out in a couple of minutes. Did the Lakinites or whatever they called themselves think the Lizards would give them a big kiss on the cheek for trying to make like soldiers?

  He turned to the radioman. “Call our boys in town and tell ’em to get out. Tell ’em to bring out as many of the townies with guns as they can.” He laughed. “Those folks don’t know it yet, but they just joined the Army.” Several of his troopers had joined in the same highly informal way. If you were willing to put your neck on the line to fight the Lizards, Uncle Sam was more than willing to give you a chance to do it by the numbers.