“Why are you so hot to be rid of this particular Big Ugly, superior sir?” the pilot asked.
“Because he is the biggest nuisance on this entire nuisance of a planet,” Drefsab answered. “He is responsible for more grief to the Race than any other three Big Ugly males I can think of.” He didn’t go into detail; the pilot had no need to know. But his sincerity was so obvious that the pilot turned one eye turret to look at him for a moment before returning full attention to the flight.
The ruined gray stone pile of Klis drew swiftly nearer. Drefsab waited for the Tosevites hiding within to open up with small-arms fire. Satellite and aerial reconnaissance both claimed they had no antiaircraft artillery in there. He hoped the males in recon knew whereof they spoke.
He wished he’d tasted ginger before he got into the helicopter. His body craved it. But he’d restrained himself. Ginger would take away his doubts, and against a foe as wily as Skorzeny he wanted them all in place.
“Shouldn’t they be shooting at us by now?” the weapons officer asked. The castle of Klis seemed very quiet and peaceful, as if no raiders had lived in it for thousands of years. Drefsab hissed softly. Thousands of years ago, the castle probably hadn’t even been built. Tosev 3 was a new world.
He answered the male’s question: “You never can tell with Big Uglies. They may be lying low, hoping to make us think they aren’t really there. Or they may have some sort of ambush set.”
“I’d like to see them try, superior sir,” the weapons officer said. “It’d be a sorry-looking ambush after it bit down on us.”
Drefsab liked his confidence. “Let’s give the place a sandstorm of fire, to make sure we don’t have any trouble getting our males on the ground.”
“It shall be done.” The weapons officer and the pilot spoke together. The pilot called on the radio to his opposite numbers in the other two helicopters. One of them dropped to the ground to unload its soldiers. The other, along with the helicopter in which Drefsab flew, popped up into the air and started pasting the castle of Klis with rockets and machine-gun bullets. No return fire came. As soon as the eight males had scuttled out of the landed helicopter, it rose into the air to join the barrage, while the second one descended to disgorge its soldiers.
Drefsab took a firm grip on his personal weapon. He intended to go down there with the fighting males, and to be certain Skorzeny was dead. There were whole little Tosevite empires that had caused the Race less trouble than that one Deutsch male. Stolen nuclear materials, Mussolini kidnapped to spew propaganda against the Race, a landcruiser lifted out from under everyone’s snout at Besançon, and who could guess how many other crimes lay at his feet.
Males scrambled away from the second helicopter, opening up with their personal weapons to add to the fire that made whatever defenders huddled in Klis keep their heads down. The pilot started to lower Drefsab’s helicopter to let off the males it carried, but before he could grab the collective, the radio speaker taped to his hearing diaphragm began to chatter.
“You’d better hear this, superior sir,” he said, and touched the control that fed the incoming signal to the main speaker in the flight cabin.
Through engine noise and ordnance, a male’s voice squawked, “Superior sir, the outwalls of our base are under attack by a motley crew of Big Uglies with rifles and other small arms. Their forcing a breach seems unlikely, but our defending males have taken some casualties.” Some of the noise of firing, Drefsab realized, was coming out of the speaker.
“If the situation is not urgent, I shall continue neutralizing this target before I return,” he answered. His mouth fell open in a laugh of amusement and relief. So Skorzeny had chosen this moment to attack, had he? Well, he would pay for it. The fighting males he’d left here would be destroyed. The Race would keep a garrison in Klis from now on. Control in this area would expand at the expense of the Deutsche, and one Drefsab, ginger-tasting addict though he was, would rise in prestige and importance to the leaders of the Race’s forces on Tosev 3.
“Shall I proceed as planned, superior sir?” the pilot asked.
“Yes,” Drefsab said, and the helicopter lost altitude. Drefsab ran a battery check on the radio gear implanted in his helmet. If the main base needed to get in touch with him, he wanted to ensure that he wasn’t cut off. That was the only special precaution he took against Skorzeny’s attack.
Ever so gently, the helicopter’s wheels touched ground. Drefsab clapped the helmet onto his head and hurried back into the fighting compartment to exit with the rest of the males.
When Jäger fought, he was usually closed up inside the thick steel shell of a panzer, which muffled the racket all around him. The tavern’s wall didn’t do nearly so good a job as that; the rifle and machine-gun fire from and at the wall of Diocletian’s palace all sounded as if it were aimed right at him. The other soldiers and guerrillas in the back room of Barisha’s tavern took no special notice, so he assumed they were used to this kind of din.
Through it, Skorzeny said, “Two minutes!” in German, Italian, and Serbo-Croatian. In German alone, he went on, “Do we have all the men with the automatic weapons closest to the hole?”
The question was rhetorical; he’d bullied people into place before the shooting outside started. With his FG-42, Jäger was one of the lucky few who would lead the way through the tunnel. Around the troops with automatic rifles clustered those who carried submachine guns; the men who bore ordinary bolt-action rifles would bring up the rear.
“One minute!” Skorzeny said, and then, what seemed to Jäger a year or two later, “Now!” He was the first one to plunge into the tunnel.
Jäger went in either fourth or fifth; in all the jostling, he wasn’t sure which. The dim light behind him vanished, leaving him surrounded by absolute black. The toe of his boot caught the heel of the man in front of him. He stumbled and almost fell. When he straightened up, his head bumped the low ceiling. Dirt showered down; some got inside his collar and slid down his back. He wished he had a helmet—for more reasons than keeping the dirt off. He also wondered how Skorzeny was faring in the tunnel—the SS man, who lacked only eight or ten centimeters of two meters, probably had to bend himself double to move at all.
Though the tunnel couldn’t have been more than fifteen meters long, it seemed to go on forever. It was narrow as well as low-ceilinged; whenever his elbow bumped a wall, Jäger felt as if it were closing in on him. He was afraid someone would start screaming in the confining dark. Some people couldn’t even stand being shut up in a panzer with the hatches dogged. The tunnel was a hundred times worse.
He realized he could see the silhouette of the soldier in front of him. A couple of paces later, he emerged in a dusty storeroom illuminated only by lights from other rooms, none of them especially close. All the same, after the tunnel it seemed almost noonday bright.
“Spread out, spread out,” Skorzeny urged in a hissing whisper. “Give the men behind you room to get out.” When the whole force had emerged, Skorzeny thumped Jäger on the back. “The colonel here, being an expert in archaeology, knows where the stairs are.”
By now, the SS man—and several others among the raiders—had studied the underground maze enough to know it as well as Jäger, if not better. He appreciated the nod even so: it reminded the men that his word counted next after Skorzeny’s. He said, “I just don’t want to find a lot of Lizards down here. If we have to fight underground, we won’t get up to the surface and sweep them off the walls.”
“That’s what Petrovic’s diversion is for,” Skorzeny said: “to flush all of them up to the top so they won’t notice us till too late—for them.”
Jäger knew that was what the diversion was for. He also knew diversions weren’t always diverting enough to do what they were supposed to do. He kept quiet. They’d find out soon enough how well this one had worked.
Skorzeny turned his attention to the group as a whole. “My advice is simple: shoot first.” He repeated the phrase in Italian and Serbo-Croati
an. The men he led just grinned—they’d figured that one out for themselves. Skorzeny grinned, too. “Come on, you lugs.” As he’d been first into the tunnel, he was first out of the storeroom.
Jäger had never seen the underground maze of hallways and chambers in Diocletian’s palace, not till now. But he moved through it confidently, counting off turns under his breath as he trotted along. A blast of heat came from one big room he passed: the Lizard barracks. If ever the raiders would be discovered down here, this was the place.
No shouts, no hisses, no gunfire. There ahead were the stone stairs. Skorzeny bounded up them three at a time. The rest of the men, Jäger still near the front of the pack, ran at his heels. The panzer colonel’s stomach knotted. An eye turret turned at the wrong moment and the assault could still turn into a slaughter.
Trying to match the Lizards’ swiveling eyes, his head twisted every which way as he reached the top of the stairs. The aliens were still banging away from the wall, but the bulk of the baptistry hid them from him—and him from them.
Skorzeny used hand signals to divide the raiders into two groups and to show no one had better argue against Jäger’s leading one of them. He pointed right and then forward to show Jäger’s group was to go around the baptistry, then led his own group to the left.
“Come on,” Jäger hissed to his men. He trotted at their fore: if you wanted to impress anybody who’d already seen Skorzeny in action, you’d better lead from the front. Otherwise, your men wouldn’t follow you for long.
He waved the group to a halt as they came to the corner of the baptistry. FG-42 at the ready, he stepped out into the narrow street that led north to the wall. As he did so, he heard Skorzeny’s group start firing.
A Lizard a couple of hundred meters ahead whirled at that unexpected sound. It caught sight of Jäger. Before it could bring up its rifle, he cut it down. “Forward!” he shouted, and ran up the street. The pound of boots on cobblestones behind him said he’d brought his troops with him.
Personal weapon at the ready, Drefsab scrambled over a big gray stone and dropped down into the enclosed area of the castle of Klis. His feet scrunched on dry weeds. Several other males were already there, scurrying around and nervously checking anything that could hide a Big Ugly.
Thus far, they’d found precisely nothing. Drefsab was disappointed—he wanted Skorzeny dead and proved dead. But sealing off this place and taking possession of it for the Race wasn’t bad in and of itself, either. High time to expand the foothold in Croatia beyond the town of Split, he thought.
“They’ve been here,” a male said, pointing to the litter scattered wherever it wasn’t visible from Split. “Why aren’t they here now?” He sounded indignant; to the Race, the world by rights should have been a neatly predictable place.
“They may have timed their attack in town to match ours here,” Drefsab answered. “Their intelligence is revoltingly good.” That didn’t surprise him overmuch; only natural for beings of one kind to stick together against those of another, especially when the latter were trying to conquer them.
He badly wanted a taste of ginger. He’d all but promised the fleetlord that he’d bring back Skorzeny’s head in a clear block of acrylic resin. Would Atvar be content if presented with a mere strategic gain rather than said head? Unless Skorzeny got himself killed and identified back in Split, it looked as if Drefsab would have to find out. Ginger wouldn’t change that, but would keep him from having to think about it for a while.
Another male waved to him from a stone-lined hole in the ground. “Over here, superior sir,” he said. “Looks like the Big Uglies that haunted this place made their home underground.”
Drefsab shone an electric torch into the hole. Even without it, he would have been sure this was a Big Ugly den: the Tosevites’ rank, meaty smell filled the scent receptors on his tongue. He played the torch back and forth, then let out a low hiss. “This place will hold a lot of Big Uglies.”
“That’s true, superior sir,” the male agreed. “Where do you suppose they’ve all gone?”
“Some of them back to their villages, I suppose, and some into town to attack our walls,” Drefsab answered. He stuck out his tongue. The words did not taste right. From all he’d learned of Skorzeny, such a simpleminded frontal assault seemed out of character.
“If you want us to set up camp in this pile of stones, superior sir, I hope you don’t expect us to use that place down there.” The soldier also stuck out his tongue, and waggled it in derision and disgust. “It stinks.”
“That it does,” Drefsab said. “And no, I promise you won’t have to set up your sleeping gear down there—not until we fumigate, anyhow.” His mouth and the other male’s dropped open in a laugh.
The speaker built into his helmet suddenly screamed at him: “Superior sir! Superior sir! We’re under attack not just from outside the wall but also from within! Somehow a large party of Big Uglies managed to get inside the walls without being noticed. We’re taking heavy casualties. Need for assistance urgent in the extreme!”
Drefsab made a noise like a pressure cooker forgotten on top of a hot stove. “None of them slipped away to their villages,” he said when coherent speech returned. The male beside him stared in confusion; he hadn’t heard the desperate call. Drefsab went on, “They all went down into Split.” No, Skorzeny wasn’t simpleminded at all.
“Who? The Big Uglies?” the male asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.
Drefsab ignored him. He waved to the soldiers scattered over the castle of Klis. “Back to the helicopters!” he shouted. “Quick as you can!”
A virtue of the Race was obedience to superiors. The males neither hesitated nor asked questions. They ran toward the helicopters as fast as their legs would take them. Behind the armor-glass windscreens, the pilots waved frantically. They’d got the message, too, then.
Drefsab dashed up to the cockpit. “To the fortress!” he snarled. “Skorzeny will pay for this. Oh, how he will pay.”
All the pilot said was, “It shall be done.” He pulled up on the collective. The helicopter sprang into the air. It wheeled within its own diameter and darted back toward Split. Only then did the pilot say, “May I ask your plan, superior sir?”
“Use our firepower to blast the Big Uglies out of the fortress,” Drefsab answered. “They may have smuggled in men and rifles; I refuse to believe they could carry antiaircraft weapons into Split without our noticing.”
“No doubt you are right about that, superior sir,” the weapons officer said with all proper deference. “But I see I must remind you that we expended most of our munitions in the bombardment of that empty castle. We have little left to use back at the city.”
Drefsab stared at him in blank dismay. After a moment, he said, “Keep going anyhow. I’ll think of something.” The ground blurred by under the helicopter. He didn’t have much time.
Jäger had fought house to house, street to street, in towns and cities in the Ukraine. He’d hated it then. Even with a panzer wrapped around him, it was deadly dangerous work. Doing it in nothing but these ragged clothes struck him as clinically insane. “You’d never get me to join the infantry now,” he muttered, sheltered in the doorway of a building near the wall. “I did that the last war.”
Bullets sprayed past him, biting chips out of stone and brickwork. They stung when they hit; if you got one in the eye, it could blind you. The Lizards all had automatic weapons and, by the way they hosed fire around, they might have had all the ammunition in the world, too. Jäger was too aware that he didn’t. The FG-42 was a wonderful weapon, but it went through magazines in a hurry.
Several men in front of him shot back at the Lizards. That was the signal for him and half a dozen fellows with him to leapfrog forward past them. Leaving the doorway was as hard as getting out of a trench and springing across no-man’s-land had been in France a generation ago. But fire and move was how you fought as a foot soldier if you wanted any kind of chance of living to do it again.
He bounded along the cobblestones, bent over as if his belly griped him to make himself as small a target for the Lizards as he could. The men firing hadn’t suppressed all the enemies ahead. Bullets struck sparks from the cobbles close by his feet and ricocheted away at crazy angles.
He’d had a new doorway in mind when he started his dash. He threw himself into it, panting as if he’d just run a marathon rather than a few meters. A moment later, another fellow squeezed in behind him. In Slavic-accented German, he asked, “Think any of the things are inside here?”
Jäger made a sour face. “We’re getting up close to their position. It could be.”
“I have grenade,” the Croat said, pulling a German potatomasher model from his belt. He tried a thick wooden door. The knob turned in his hand. That was plenty to make Jäger suspicious, and the Croat as well. He unscrewed the grenade’s protective cap, yanked the igniter, opened the door, chucked in the grenade, and slammed it again.
The blast made Jäger’s head pound. Fragments rattled off the door. Jäger flung it open once more, sprayed a quick burst into the chamber to catch any Lizards the grenade had missed. Then he dove behind a massive oaken desk that had probably sat there since the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The Croat ran to the next door in, fired a few rounds from his submachine gun, then peered around the corner. That was the right order in which to do things. He grunted. “I think we maybe are lucky.”
“Better for us to shoot up the place and not need to than to need to and not do it,” Jäger said. The Croat nodded. Taking no chances even so, Jäger crawled back to the outer doorway.
Just as he got there, a blast like a 500-kilo bomb went off to the north. When he ever so cautiously looked out of the doorway, he saw a great hole in the outwall to Diocletian’s palace. The antiquarian in him lamented. The soldier rejoiced—Skorzeny’s raiders had distracted the Lizards enough to let Petrovic’s men lay the explosives next to the wall.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 140