The Lizard panzer’s machine gun stopped spitting flame. It swung away from the woods; Jager envied the turret’s quick power traverse. If he’d had himself a machine like that, now, he could have accomplished something worthwhile. It was wasted on the Lizards, who, had hardly a clue about how to exploit it.
The tank wallowed forward through the mud. Jager had made the acquaintance of Russian mud the previous fall and spring. It had done its best to glue his Panzer III in one place for good; he was not altogether disappointed to watch it give the Lizards trouble, too.
His attention shifted from the tank to the trucks and soldiers it was guarding. The trucks, like any wheeled vehicles, were having a lot of trouble in the mud. The NKVD man back in Moscow had been right; they were unusually heavy. Every so often a Lizard soldier, looking even more alien than usual in a shiny gray suit that covered him from toe claws to crown, would go over and put something-at this distance, Jager couldn’t tell what-into the back of a truck.
I hope we don’t have to hijack a vehicle, he thought. Given the state of what the Russians, for lack of a suitably malodorous word, called roads, he wasn’t sure the band could hijack a Lizard truck.
From a position carefully camouflaged by tall dead grass, a German machine gun began to bark. A couple of Lizards fell. Others started to run, while still others, wiser or more experienced, flattened out on the ground as human soldiers would have done. The glass blew out of a truck’s windshield when a round or two struck home; Jager couldn’t see what happened to the driver.
The commander of the Lizard panzer needed longer to notice the machine gun had opened up than he should have. The Dummkopf had his cupola buttoned up, too; Jager would have demoted a man (to say nothing of blistering his ears and maybe his backside) for a piece of stupidity-or was it cowardice? — like that.
When the Lizard finally deigned to pay some attention to the machine gun nest, he did just what Jager had hoped he would: instead of standing off and annihilating it with a round or two from his cannon, he charged toward it, his own machine gun chattering.
The German weapon fell silent. That worried Jager; if the Lizard got lucky with his own machine gun, the partisan band might have to back off and come up with a new plan. But then the concealed machine gun started up again, now firing straight at the oncoming tank.
Save as a goad, that was useless; Jager watched 7.92mm bullets spark off the Lizard panzer’s invincible front armor and fly away uselessly. The popgun onslaught, though, was intended only as a goad, to make sure the enemy tank commander took the machine-gun nest too seriously to worry about anything else.
Georg Schultz let out a gleeful grunt “God damn me to hell if he isn’t taking the bait, sir.”
“Ja,” Jager answered absently. He watched the panzer slog through the mud until it was just past the edge of the woods. Then its main arnament did speak, a bellow that made Jager’s ears ring. Mud fountained up from just behind the German machine-gun nest, but the weapon kept returning fire.
Jager turned his head to glance over at Max. “Brave men there,” he remarked.
The muzzle of the cannon lowered a centimeter or so, fired again. This time, the machine gun was put out of action-a singularly bloodless term, Jager thought, for haying a couple of men suddenly made into mangled chunks of raw meat.
But Otto Skorzeny was already dashing forward from the birch trees toward the Lizard panzer. The enemy tank commander must have been looking straight through his forward cupola periscope, for he never saw the big SS man pounding toward him from the flank and rear. Muck flying from his boots as he ran, Skorzeny covered the couple of hundred meters out to the panzer in time an Olympic sprinter might have envied.
The big machine started to move just, as he came up on it. He scrambled onto the rear deck, chucked a satchel charge under the overhang of the turret, and dove off headfirst. The charge exploded. The turret jerked as if kicked by a mule. Blue flames spurted from the engine compartment. An escape hatch in the front of the panzer popped open. A Lizard sprang out.
Jager took no notice of the alien enemy. He was watching Skorzeny leg it back toward the shelter of the woods. Then his gaze slid to Max again. “Fuck you, Nazi,” the Jewish partisan repeated. But even he saw that would not do, not by itself. Grudgingly, he added, “That SS bastard isn’t just brave, he’s fucking crazy.”
Since Jager had thought the same thing since he met Skorzeny in Moscow, he declined to argue. Along with everyone else in the band, he grabbed his rifle, got to his feet, and ran toward the Lizards of the salvage crew, shouting at the top of his lungs.
The heavy protective suits made the Lizards slow and awkward. They fell like ninepins. Jager wondered how safe it was for him to be tramping about with no more protection than his helmet, but only for a moment. Getting shot was a much more pressing concern.
“Come on, come on, come on!” he shouted, pointing toward the truck the German machine gun had shot up. It hadn’t moved since. When he got up to it, he found out why: one of the rounds that shattered the windshield had also blown out the back of the driver’s head. The blood and brains splashed over the inside of the cab looked no different from those of a human being similarly killed.
Having made sure the truck driver was in fact dead, Jager hurried around to the rear of the vehicle. The latch there was very much like the one on an earthly truck. The partisans already had it open. Jager peered into the cargo compartment, which was lit by fluorescent tubes that ran from front to back across the ceiling.
The mud-covered little misshapen chunks of metal that lay on the floor of the compartment seemed hardly worth the trouble to which the Lizards had gone to recover them. But they were what the raiders had come to steal: if the Lizards wanted them so badly, they ought to be worth having.
Along with his rifle, Max carried an entrenching tool. He scooped up several of those innocuous-looking muddy lumps, dumped them into a lead-lined wooden box a couple of the other partisans hauled between them. The instant he finished, they slammed on the lid. Three men spoke together. “Let’s get out of here.”
The advice was, to say the least, timely. The Lizards had another panzer off in the distance, maybe a kilometer and a halfaway. It started churning toward them. In the same instant, muzzle flashes sprang from the machine gun on its turret. Bullets cracked past the running men. One of them fell with a groan. Long-range machine-gun fire wasn’t much good for taking out any particular individual, but it could decimate troops caught in the open. Jager had fought on the Somme in 1916. German machine guns then had done a lot worse than decimating the oncoming British.
Unlike those brave but foolish Englishmen a generation before, the partisans were not advancing into barbed-wire entanglements but running for the cover of the woods. They were almost there when one of the men carrying the lead-lined chest threw up his hands and pitched forward onto his face. Jager was only a few meters away. He grabbed the handle the partisan had dropped. The box was astonishingly heavy for its size, but not too heavy to lift. Jager and the Jew on the other side ran on.
The sound of dead leaves scrunching wetly under his feet was one of the loveliest things he’d ever heard: it meant he’d made it into the woods. He and his fellow bearer dodged around tree trunks, trying to take advantage of as much cover as they could.
Behind them, the Lizard panzer kept firing, but it didn’t sound as if it was getting any closer. Jager turned to the partisan beside him. “I think the bastard bogged down.” The Jew nodded. The two men grinned at each other as they hurried away from the tank.
Jager felt surprising confidence build in him. He’d thought of this mission as suicidal ever since the NKVD man proposed it back in Moscow. That hadn’t kept him from taking part; suicidal missions were part of war and, if they served the cause, were often worth attempting. But now he began to think he might actually get away with this one. Then-well, he’d worry about then later. He began to think he’d have a later in which to worry about then.
A whirring thutter in the air brought all his fears flooding back. Knowing it was foolish, knowing it was dangerous, he glanced over his shoulder. The helicopter swelled in the split second he watched it. Its guns started to chatter. Mud wouldn’t slow it down. Left alone, it could hover over the bare-branched woods and lash the raiders with fire until they had to give up their mission.
Wham, wham, wham! From among the trees, a 2-centimeter antiaircraft cannon opened up on the helicopter. With its light mount, designed for mountain warfare, it had made up twenty-seven man-portable loads; Jager had hauled one of them himself. It was a German weapon, served by a German crew: part of the reason the Soviets had been willing to include Wehrmacht men along with their own partisans in this band.
The Lizard helicopter just hung in midair for a moment, as if disbelieving the guerrillas could seriously attack it. It was proof against rifle bullets, but not against the antiaircraft gun’s shells. Jager watched them chew it to pieces, watched chunks of metal fly from it at every hit.
Too late, the helicopter swung toward its tormentor. The 2-centimeter Flak 38 kept pounding away. Like a sinking ship, the helicopter heeled over onto one side and crashed.
The raiders’ cheers filled the woods. Max pumped his fist in the air and screamed, “Take that, you-” Jager couldn’t follow the rest of the Yiddish he called it, but it sounded explosive. The panzer major yelled himself, then blinked. Fighting alongside a Jew was one thing; tactics dictated that. Finding you agreed with him, finding you might even like him as a man, was something else again. If he lived long enough, Jager would have to think about that.
Otto Skorzeny came dodging through the trees. Even filthy, even in dappled SS camouflage gear, he managed to look dapper. He shouted, “Move, you stupid fools! If we don’t get away now, we never will. You think the Lizards are going to sit there with their thumbs up their arses forever? It’s your funeral, if you do.”
As usual, Skorzeny galvanized everyone around him. The Red partisans undoubtedly hated him still, but who could argue with a man who’d just singlehandedly wrecked a Lizard panzer? The raiders hurried deeper into the woods.
None too soon-again Jager heard the thuttering roar of helicopters in the air. He glanced back and saw a pair of them now. The Germans manning the antiaircraft cannon opened up at long range this time, hoping to knock down one in a hurry so they could fight the other on more even terms-and also hoping to draw both machines’ fire onto themselves and away from their fleeing comrades.
The helicopters separated, swung around to engage the antiaircraft cannon from opposite sides. Jager wished the gun were a big 88; it could have’ swatted the copters like flies. But an 88 was anything but a man-portable weapon-it had a barrel almost seven meters long and weighed more than eight tonnes. The stubby mountain antiaircraft gun would have to do.
One of the helicopters blew up in midair, showering flaming debris over the woods. The other bored in for a firing run. Jager watched tracers from the cannon on the ground swivel through a wild arc, then stab up at the second helicopter while tracers from its machine guns stabbed down.
The 2-centimeter Flak 38 suddenly fell silent. But the helicopter did not go on to pursue the partisans. A rending crash moments later told him why. The gunners had done their duty as well as they were able-better than anyone dared hope when the mission was planned.
The partisan carrying the lead-lined box with Jager was at the end of his tether, stumbling and staggering and gasping like a man breathing his last Jager scowled at him. “Get away from there and put somebody else on that handle before you ruin the mission and get us both killed.” Only after he’d spoken did he notice the order in which he’d put those two elements. He grunted. In case he hadn’t noticed, that would have told him he was a thoroughly trained soldier.
The raider nodded his thanks and reeled away. Georg Schultz hurried up. “Here, I’ll take some of that, sir,” he said, nodding to the burden Jager now held alone.
“No, let me.” It was Max, the foul-mouthed Jewish partisan: He wasn’t as big, probably wasn’t as strong as Schultz, but he’d shown himself to be wiry and tough. All other things being equal, Jager would have preferred his tank gunner beside him, but all other things were not equal. The mission might depend on cooperation between surviving Germans and Russians. Having two Germans carrying the precious whatever-it-was inside that chest might make the Reds think harder about selling them out.
All that ran through Jager’s head in a couple of seconds. He couldn’t afford to think very long; hanging onto the chest solo was hard work. He said, “Let the Jew do it, Georg.” Schultz looked unhappy but fell back a couple of paces. Max took one of the handles from Jager. Together, they started moving again.
Even as he trotted beside Jager, Max glared at him. “How would you like it if I said, ‘Let the fucking Nazi do it,’ eh, Mister fucking Nazi?”
“That’s Major fucking Nazi to you, Mister Jew,” Jager retorted. “And the next time you want to go swearing at me, kindly remember those flak men back there who stayed at their gun and got shot up to help you make your getaway.”
“They did their jobs,” Max snapped. But after he spat into a clump of brown leaves, he added, “Yeah, all right, I’ll remember them in the kaddish.”
“I don’t know that word,” Jager said.
“Prayer for the dead,” Max said shortly. He glanced toward Jager again. Now his gaze was measuring instead of hostile, but somehow no easier to bear. “You don’t know fucking much, do you? You don’t know Babi Yar for instance, eh?”
“No,” Jager admitted. “What’s that?”
“Place a little outside of Kiev, not far from here, as a matter of fact. You find a big hole in the ground, then line Jews up at the edge of it. Men, women, children-doesn’t matter. You line ’em up, you shoot ’em in the back of the neck. They fall right into their own graves. You Germans are fucking efficient, you know? Then you line up another row and shoot them, too. You keep doing it till your big hole is full. Then you find yourself another fucking hole.”
“Propaganda-” Jager said.
Without a word, Max used his free hand to pull down the collar of his peasant’s blouse and bare his neck. Jager knew a gunshot scar when he saw one. The Jew said, “I must have jerked just as the gun went off behind me. I fell down. They had bastards down in the hole with more guns, making sure everybody really was dead. They must have missed me. I hope they don’t get a fucking reprimand, you know? More people fell on me, but not too many-it was getting late. When it was dark, I managed to crawl out and get away. I’ve been killing fucking Germans ever since.”
Jager didn’t answer. He hadn’t gone out of his way to notice what happened to Jews in Russian territory taken by the Germans. Nobody in the Wehrmacht went out of his way to notice that. It wasn’t safe for your career; it might not be safe for you personally. He’d heard things. Everybody heard things. He hadn’t worried much about it. After all, the Fuhrer had declared Jews the enemies of the Reich.
But there were ways soldiers treated enemies. Lining them up at the edge of a pit and shooting them from behind wasn’t supposed to be one of those ways. Jager tried to imagine himself doing that. It wasn’t easy. But if the Reich was at war and his superior gave him the order… He shook his head. He just didn’t know.
From across the chest, less than a meter away, his Jewish yokemate watched him flounder. Watching Max watch him only made Jager flounder harder. If Jews could flip-flop from enemies of the Reich to comrades-in-arms, that just made massacring them all the harder to stomach.
Max’s voice was sly. “You maybe have a fucking conscience?”
“Of course I have a conscience,” Jager said indignantly. Then he shut up again. If he had a conscience, as he’d automatically claimed, how was he supposed to ignore what Germany might well have been doing? (Even in his own mind, he didn’t want to phrase it any more definitely than that.).
To his relief, the woods started thinning out ahead. That meant
the most dangerous part of the mission-crossing open country with what they’d stolen from the Lizards-lay ahead. Beside the abyss whose edge he’d been treading with Max, physical danger suddenly seemed a welcome diversion. As long as be was putting his own life on the line, he’d be too busy to look down into the abyss and see the people piled there with neat holes in the backs of their necks.
The survivors of the raiding party gathered near the edge of the trees. Skorzeny took charge of them. From under the thick layer of dead leaves, he pulled out several chests which looked the same as the one Jager and Max carried but were not lead-lined. “Two men to each one,” he ordered, pausing to let the Russian partisans who understood German translate for those who didn’t. “We scatter now, two by two, to make it as hard as we can for the Lizards to figure out who has the real one.”
One of the partisans said, “How do we know the real one will go where it’s supposed to?”
All the worn, dirty men, Russians and Germans alike, nodded at that. They still had no great trust in one another; they’d fought too hard for that. Skorzeny said, “We have one from each side holding the prize. The panje wagon that’s waiting for them has one from each side, too. If they don’t try to murder each other, we’ll be all right, ja?”
The SS man laughed to show he’d made a joke. Jager looked over to Max. The Jew was not laughing. He wore the expression Jager had often seen on junior officers who faced a tough tactical problem: he was weighing his options. That meant Jager had to weigh his, too.
Skorzeny said, “We’ll go out one pair at a time. The team with the real chest will go third.”
“Who told you you were God?” a partisan asked.
The SS man’s scarred cheek crinkled as he gave an impudent grin. “Who told you I wasn’t?” He waited a moment to see if he got any more argument. When he didn’t, he swatted a man from the pair closest to him on the shoulder and shouted “Go! Go! Go!” as if they were paratroopers diving out of a Ju-52 transport plane.
In the Balance w-1 Page 40