He sprang to his feet, stormed forward. The best time to advance was while the enemy was momentarily stunned. Now the Lizards would have a doubly hard time: they’d have to fight Skorzeny’s men and keep Petrovic’s followers from getting through the breach in the wall. This mad raid just might work.
Then a stuttering roar filled the sky. Jäger dove for the nearest cover he could find. The Lizard helicopters were coming back.
Split was in flames, with smoke mounting fast into the sky. Drefsab hissed in astonished disbelief—who could have imagined a town could go from peace to ruin in so short a time? “Oh, Skorzeny, how you will pay,” he whispered.
Even as the helicopters reached the outskirts of Split, a big explosion sent a great cloud of dust leaping into the air. “They’ve blown up part of the wall,” the pilot said in dismay, scanning the electronically amplified vision display. “How did they get all these munitions into town under our muzzles?”
“Some have probably been there all along—the Big Uglies were fighting among themselves when we got here, you know. As for the rest, they’re good at it,” Drefsab said bitterly. “We didn’t X-ray every bit of every single animal cart going in, and now we’re paying the price. But if we did that everywhere, we wouldn’t have enough males to do anything else. The fault here is mine; I accept it.”
That made him feel virtuous. Otherwise, it did nothing to change matters. Split kept on burning. Radio calls for help kept pouring in. Every one of them reported some fresh Tosevite gain. “What do we do, superior sir?” the weapons officer asked, fixing Drefsab with worried eyes. “We have no rockets left, and our machine-gun ammunition is low.”
Worries about conserving ammunition, Drefsab thought, had cost the Race victories. If they lost here, it wouldn’t be on account of that. “If we don’t expend what we have, our ground position in Split falls,” he said. “Next to that, ammunition—or, come to that, three helicopters—counts for nothing. Maybe we can kill enough of the Big Uglies to make the rest break contact and give our males a chance. Let’s go try.”
“It shall be done, superior sir.” Neither the pilot nor the weapons officer sounded enthusiastic. Drefsab couldn’t blame them for that—even if the Big Uglies didn’t have antiaircraft guns, the helicopters were still going into danger: if they’d armored all the wires and hydraulics heavily enough to protect them from rifle fire, the aircraft would have been too heavy to fly. But the pilot didn’t hesitate. He radioed Drefsab’s orders to his two comrades.
The three helicopters skimmed low over the rooftops of Split. They started taking fire long before they got to the rectangular stone wall the Race had used as a perimeter for its base. Some bullets went spanng! off armored sections; others punched through sheet metal in less vital spots.
Drefsab quickly realized the ground fire away from the fortress came from Big Uglies who just happened to have rifles and pistols. It turned into a storm of bullets when the aircraft approached the fighting zone. “Shall I return fire against the Tosevite males outside the walls, superior sir?” the weapons officer asked.
“No,” Drefsab said. “The ones who got inside are even more important. If we have only limited ammunition, we’ll use it at the point of decision.”
Again, the pilot relayed Drefsab’s will to the males flying the other two helicopters. All three machines hovered above the narrowing area inside the walls that the Race still held. The machine guns roared. Drefsab felt a savage surge of satisfaction, almost as good as ginger, as Big Uglies twisted and fell under assault from the air.
“We’ll get them out of there yet!” he cried.
Another doorway. This time, Jäger didn’t think it would be cover enough. He kicked in the door and rolled inside, automatic rifle at the ready. No Lizard shot at him. He crawled toward a north-facing window.
Outside, death reigned. He’d hated the Lizards’ helicopters when he was in a panzer. Their rockets smashed through armor as if it were pasteboard. Against infantry, their machine guns were similarly destructive.
The fire wasn’t aimed. It didn’t need to be. As he’d seen in France in the last war, machine guns put out so many bullets that if this one didn’t get you, the next one would. Without luck amounting to divine intervention, anyone caught on the street without cover would be dead.
The helicopters’ noses seemed to be spitting flame. Jäger squeezed off a burst at the nearest of them, then rolled away as fast as he could. He had no idea whether he’d damaged the helicopter, but he was sure as need be that the Lizards would have spotted his muzzle flashes.
Sure enough, bullets battered the wall. Some pierced the stones; others sent shards of glass from the broken window flying like shell fragments. Something bit Jäger in the leg. Blood began to soak into his trousers. It wasn’t a flood. He cautiously tried putting weight on the leg. It held. He might not run as fast as usual for a while, but he could move around pretty well. He headed up to the second story of the building. When he got there, he planned on firing another burst at the helicopters. It would also let him deliver plunging fire against the Lizards at the base of the wall. He was still on the stairs when the firing from the helicopters died away: first one machine gun fell silent, then a second, then a third.
His first thought was to rush—or come as close as he could to rushing with a sliver of glass in his leg—back down and join the final attack that would sweep away the last of the Lizards. His second thought was that his first one was less than smart. The Lizards surely had imagination enough to stop shooting and see how many men they could fool into thinking they’d run out of ammunition.
He went up to the second floor after all. The helicopters still hung menacingly in the air, but they weren’t shooting. Men on the ground—Skorzeny’s forces and Petrovic’s both—kept blazing away at them, though. Jäger fired, too. This time the Lizards didn’t shoot back.
“Maybe you are out of ammo,” he muttered to himself. Even so, he didn’t hurry downstairs and rush out into the street. Maybe they weren’t out of ammo, too.
Drefsab turned to the weapons officer in anger and dismay when the machine gun stopped firing. “Is that all of it?” he demanded.
“Not quite, superior sir, but almost all,” the fellow answered. “I’ve reserved the last couple of hundred rounds. Whatever decision you make on how or if we use them, though, I suggest you make it quickly. We already have one male wounded back in the fighting compartment, and we can’t stay under such intense fire indefinitely. The odds of any one bullet doing us significant damage are low, but we are encountering a great many bullets.”
That was an understatement. The patter and clatter of incoming rounds all but deafened Drefsab. He said, “The area close to the wall is too built up to let us land and take aboard those of our males who still live.” He added the interrogative cough to that, though it looked pretty plain to him. Maybe the pilot would tell him he was wrong.
But the pilot didn’t. “We could fit the fuselages of our machines down there, superior sir, but the rotors—” He didn’t finish the sentence, but Drefsab had no trouble finishing it for him. The pilot went on, “We do still have fuel enough to return to Italia, where the Race holds unchallenged control.” He sounded hopeful.
“No,” Drefsab said flatly. He reached into a pouch on his belt, took out a vial of ginger, and tasted. The pilot and weapons officer gaped at him. He didn’t care. Atvar the fleetlord knew he was addicted, so what these low-grade officers thought mattered not at all to him. He said, “We shall not flee.”
“But, superior sir—” The pilot broke off, perhaps because of drilled subordination, perhaps because he couldn’t decide whether to protest Drefsab’s tactics or the vial of ginger he still held so blatantly in his left hand.
Ginger certainty and ginger cunning rushed through Drefsab. “The Big Uglies can’t have brought all that many males into the fortress,” he said. “If we land behind them, where we took off, we can catch them between two fires, as they’ve done with our males dow
n there.”
Now the pilot had something concrete to which to object: “But, superior sir, we’ve twenty-three effectives at most; I don’t know if anyone aboard the other helicopters is wounded.”
“Thirty,” Drefsab corrected, his voice cold. “Pilots and weapons officers have their personal weapons, and I have mine. If we can drive the Big Uglies from the fortress, we may be able to hold on here long enough for reinforcements to arrive.”
The pilot was still staring. Drefsab deliberately looked away from him, daring him to protest further. To underline his contempt, he tasted again. Ginger filled him with the burning urge to do something, and with the confidence that if he just acted boldly, everything would turn out fine.
“Back to the landing area,” he snapped.
“It shall be done, superior sir,” the pilot said miserably. He relayed Drefsab’s command to the other two helicopters.
When the helicopters darted away, Jäger hoped with all his heart they were fleeing. But, though the engine noise diminished, it didn’t vanish.
“Where are they going?” he muttered suspiciously. He couldn’t believe they would just up and fly away, not when they’d done such a job of working over the humans’ positions moments before. He tried to think himself into the head of the Lizard commander—Drefsab, Skorzeny had said his name was. The exercise had proved useful over and over again in the Soviet Union. If you could figure out what the other fellow needed to do, you were halfway to keeping him from doing it.
All right, assume this Drefsab was no fool. He wouldn’t be, not if he’d made the Lizards shape up in Besançon (Jäger wondered how his regiment was faring; the news out of France—and then out of Germany—hadn’t been good) and been entrusted with swinging the Croats away from Germany.
What to do, then? Those big Lizard helicopters carried soldiers as well as munitions. What would Skorzeny do if he had some men he could put anywhere he wanted? The answer to that formed of itself in Jäger’s mind: he’d stick them up the enemy’s rear. He’d done just that, here in Split.
Next question was, would Skorzeny figure that out for himself? He’d better.
Jäger couldn’t get in touch with him by radio or field telephone. But Skorzeny was no fool, either. He’d think of something like that … Jäger told himself hopefully.
The panzer colonel wondered if he ought to head back toward the rear. Before he made up his mind, he decided to evaluate the position he already held. He moved toward the window, peered out from well back in the room so as not to make himself an obvious target for the Lizards by the wall.
He needed only a couple of seconds to realize he was in too good a place to abandon. He could see four or five Lizards no more than a hundred meters from him, and they didn’t know he was there. He switched the FG-42 from automatic to single-shot, raised it, breathed out, and touched the trigger on the exhale. The automatic rifle bucked against his shoulder. One of the Lizards toppled over bonelessly.
Even single-shot, the weapon was a lot faster than a bolt-action rifle. All you had to do was pull the trigger again. He missed a shot at his second Lizard, but his next round was on the way before the creature could react to the one before. He didn’t think he made a clean kill on that Lizard, but he was sure he’d hit it. Getting it out of the fight would definitely do.
Instinct made him move away from the window after that. Hardly had he done so when bullets came searching for him. He nodded to himself. If you pushed things too far, you paid for it.
Firing broke out off to the south, at first mostly Lizards’ weapons, then men’s answering back. Jäger nodded again. Drefsab was trying to retrieve the situation, all right. He might have been a nasty little alien from the black depths of unknown space, but he knew what fighting was all about.
Drefsab had been trained as an intelligence officer. When he got to Tosev 3, he’d never expected to meet combat face-to-face. His brief forays in a landcruiser at Besançon hadn’t come close to preparing him for what infantry fighting—especially in the heart of a town—was like.
The helicopters had remained under fire all the way to the landing area from which they’d taken off what seemed like a couple of years before. A male was hit exiting through the troop compartment door, and another couple as they skittered toward cover. The weapons officers had used up the last precious rounds in the helicopter machine guns trying to suppress the Big Ugly defenders.
Drefsab had never felt so naked as when sprinting across the cobblestones toward a pile of rubble. Not even ginger’s bravado could make him believe he was invulnerable to the bullets cracking past him. But he reached the rubble without getting hit. He sprawled down behind it and started shooting back.
He didn’t need long to realize only a couple of Tosevites were defending against the males of the Race. The soldiers’ commander figured out the same thing at the same time. His orders crackled in the speaker inside Drefsab’s helmet. Some of the males sprayed bullets at the Big Uglies to make them keep their heads down. Others moved to gain positions from which they could fire at the enemy from the side. Soon the Tosevites were down. The males of the Race ran forward.
They hadn’t taken the Big Uglies as much by surprise as Drefsab had hoped. The trouble was, they were fighting in too small a space. An alert commander—and no one had ever faulted the Tosevites for that—could quickly pull some of his males from the fighting near the wall and send them to meet the new threat. And the males of the Race trapped against the wall had trouble exploiting that because of the danger from the Big Uglies in the buildings on the other side.
No sooner had that thought crossed Drefsab’s mind than an explosion to the north made him sure another piece of the wall had just gone down. He hissed in dismay. His detachment couldn’t hold the fortress by itself. If the males he was trying to rescue perished, Split would fall.
“Hurry!” he shouted. “We have to fight through the Tosevites and reach them.”
Two of the helicopter pilots were already down. They’d joined the attack bravely enough, but they had even less notion of how to fight on the ground than Drefsab did. And so many bullets were in the air that the most skilled soldier, if he was unlucky, would fall as readily as anyone else.
Crouched in a doorway, Drefsab tasted again. He needed the spirit ginger brought him. If it drained away, he wouldn’t be able to keep on fighting. So he told himself, at any rate.
One of the buildings ahead, or more than one, had caught fire. Smoke filled the narrow street. A determined male—especially one who was full to bursting with ginger—could take advantage of the cover. Drefsab thought there would be plenty of hiding places ahead. He burst out of the doorway, sprinted up the street.
He changed directions every few steps. No one would get a good shot at him if he could help it. The thick smoke made him gasp and cough; nictitating membranes slid across his eyes to protect them from the stinging stuff.
Through the smoke, he didn’t see the Tosevite until they almost ran into each other. He hadn’t heard him, either; the din of battle made sure of that. Even for a Big Ugly, this male was enormous. He could have made two of Drefsab.
Weapons were great equalizers, though. As Drefsab swung his toward the Tosevite, he noted that the fellow had a scar on his face, hidden not quite well enough by paint and powder. He started to shout, “Skorzeny!”
But Skorzeny had a weapon, too, a rifle of unfamiliar make. It spat a stream of fire like the automatic rifles of the Race. Something hit Drefsab a series of hammer blows. He felt only the first one or two.
Lizard jets screamed overhead. Thunderous blasts ripped across the area Diocletian’s palace had enclosed. Huddled in a doorway, Jäger prayed the building wouldn’t fall down on top of him. He didn’t think much would be left of the palace by the time the bombers were done. Sixteen hundred years of history, blown to hell in an afternoon.
The jets unloaded their last bombs and flew away. Stunned, battered, but with no worse wounds than that chunk of glass in his leg, J
äger slowly got to his feet. He looked around at the smoking ruins of what had been a scenic little port. “It’s ours,” he said.
“And a good thing, too,” somebody behind him answered. He whirled. That hurt, but his battle reflexes permitted nothing less. There stood Skorzeny. Sweat had made his makeup run, but his face was so covered with grime and soot that the scar wasn’t easy to spot, anyhow. He went on, “If we’d bogged down there, they might have been able to fly in reinforcements to their soldiers here. That wouldn’t have been much fun.”
“Not even a little bit,” Jäger said fervently. He looked around at the wreckage—and the carnage. “They’re tougher than I thought they were.”
“They can fight.” Skorzeny looked around. If the devastation bothered him, he didn’t show it. “We found out the Russians were tougher than we thought, too, but we would have licked them in the end.” Nothing seemed to get him down. Give him a military job, no matter how bizarre or impossible it seemed, and he’d go out and do it.
A Croat aimed his rifle at a Lizard prisoner. “Halt!” Jäger shouted as loud as he could—if the Croat understood any German, that would be it.
“Stop that!” Skorzeny echoed, even louder than Jäger. “What the bleeding hell do you think you’re doing, you shitheaded syphilitic cretinous puddle of dog puke?”
The Croat understood German, all right. He swung his rifle away from the frightened, cringing Lizard—and halfway toward Skorzeny. “I get rid of this thing,” he said. “Maybe I get rid of you first.”
Most of the men on the battered streets, most of the men who had done the fighting in Split, were Croats, not Germans. A lot of them started drifting over toward Skorzeny and Jäger. They didn’t quite aim their weapons at the German officers, but they had them ready. Among them was Captain Petrovic. He looked as ready to get rid of the Germans as any of his troops.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 141