Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  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 power. He started to shout, “Skorzeny!”

  But Skorzeny had a weapon, too, a rifle of unfamiliar make 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, Jäger 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.

  Jäger said, “Shooting Lizards is wasteful. They know so much that we don’t. Better to keep them alive and squeeze it out of them.”

  The Croat with the rifle spat. “This I care for what they know. I know I enjoy killing this one, so I do it.”

  “If you kill that Lizard, I’ll kill you,” Skorzeny said, as casually as if he were sitting over coffee with the Croat. “If you try to kill me, I’ll kill you. Colonel Jäger is right, and you damn well know it.”

  The Croat’s scowl got blacker yet. He did not move his rifle another centimeter in Skorzeny’s direction, though. Jäger gestured to the Lizard: a peremptory come-here. The Lizard skittered over to stand beside him.

  “Good,” Skorzeny said softly. He turned to Petrovic, r
aised his voice: “Order your men to round up the rest of the Lizards and bring them here. From what I’ve heard, we should have twenty or so who surrendered, plus about as many wounded. I want them all there—immediately. They’re as big a haul as this whole town.”

  “You want,” Petrovic said coldly. “So what? This is the Independent State of Croatia, not Germany. I give orders here, not you. What do you do if I tell you no?”

  “Shoot you,” Skorzeny answered. “If you think I can’t take you out along with your cheerful friend over there”—he jerked his chin at the Croat who had threatened the Lizard—“before your bully boys bring me down, you’re welcome to find out if you’re right.”

  Petrovic was no coward. Had he been a coward, he wouldn’t have thrown himself into the middle of the fighting that had just ended. Skorzeny stood, almost at ease, waiting for him to do whatever he would do. Jäger did his best to match the SS man’s show of confidence. Matching his gall was something else again.

  After a long, long pause, Petrovic barked orders in Serbo-Croatian. One of his men shouted a protest. Petrovic screamed abuse at him. Jäger hadn’t picked up much of the local language, but the invective sounded impressive as hell.

  The Croats straggled away. A few minutes later, they started coming back with Lizard prisoners, first the males who had given up as the fighting ebbed and then, on makeshift litters, the crudely bandaged ones wounds had forced out of combat. Their sounds of pain were unpleasantly close to the ones men made.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d get away with that,” Jäger murmured to Skorzeny.

  “You have to make it personal,” Skorzeny whispered back. “These bastards take everything personally. I just played their game with them, and I won.” His smile was smug as he added one final word: “Again.”

  Georg Schultz said, “I figured I’d get into Moscow one way or another, but I never guessed what those ways would be—first you flew me in, and now I’m retreating into it.”

  “It isn’t funny.” Ludmila Gorbunova tore a chunk of black bread with her teeth. Someone handed her a glass of ersatz tea. She gulped it down. Someone else gave her a bowl of shchi. She gulped the cabbage soup, too. While she refueled herself, groundcrew men took care of her aircraft, pouring petrol into it, loading on light bombs, and stowing the belts of machine-gun ammunition Schultz had filled.

  “I never said it was funny,” the German said. He looked worn unto death, his skin gray rather than fair, his hair and beard unkempt, grease on his face and tunic—no one had much chance to wash these days. Purple pouches lay under his eyes.

  Ludmila was sure she was no more prepossessing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had more than a couple of hours of sleep at a stretch. Even before the Kaluga line began to unravel, she’d been desperately overtaxed. Since then . . .

  The cry was buy time. When the Germans neared Moscow in 1941, old men, boys, and tens of thousands of women had dug trenches and antitank obstacles to slow their progress. They were out again. How much good their bathers would do against the Lizards when stronger ones had already failed was questionable, but the Soviet capital would not fall without as much of a fight as the Soviet people could put up.

  “Ready, Comrade Pilot,” one of the groundcrew men shouted.

  Ready or not, Ludmila put down the bowl of shchi—thin, watery stuff, without ham or salami, and without enough cabbage, too—and got up. She climbed wearily into the U-2 biplane. Georg Schultz said, “I hope you come back. I hope we’re still here when you come back.”

  Nikifor Sholudenko walked up just in time to hear the panzer-gunner-turned-mechanic say that. The NKVD man bristled. “The penalty for defeatist talk is death,” he said.

  Schultz rounded on him. “What’s the penalty for killing the only decent technician this base has?” he retorted. “You do that, you do more to make your side lose than I do by talking.”

  “This may be true,” Sholudenko said, “but there is no fixed sentence for it.” His hand fell to the Tokarev pistol he wore on his hip.

  Ludmila knew each of them wanted the other dead. Loudly, she said, “Spin my prop, one of you. Save your war with each other until after we’ve held off the Lizards.” If we hold off the Lizards, she added to herself. Had she said that aloud, she wondered whether Sholudenko would have come down on her for defeatism. Probably not. He didn’t want to see her dead—only naked.

  The NKVD man and the ex-Wehrmacht sergeant both sprang toward the front of the Kukuruznik Schultz got there first. When he yanked at the prop, Sholudenko had to back way; walking into a spinning prop blade would kill you as surely as a pistol, and a lot more messily.

  Buzz! The prop caught; the five-cylinder radial engine spat out acrid exhaust fumes. Ludmila released the brake. The U-2 bounded over the rough airstrip (not really a strip at all, just a stretch of field), picking up speed. Ludmila gave it more throttle, eased the stick back. The ugly little biplane clawed its way into the air.

  Even in flight, the U-2 did not go from duckling to swan. Yet, as a mosquito will bite and escape where a horsefly gets noticed and swatted, Kukuruzniks came back from missions more often than any other Soviet planes.

  Not much was left of Kaluga. “Ludmila flew over the outskirts of the industrial town. The Germans had wrecked part of when they took it in their drive on Moscow in fall 1941, and the Russians had wrecked more when they took it back later the same year. Whatever they’d left standing, the Lizards had knocked down over the last couple of weeks.

  The front lay north of Kaluga these days. The Lizards had cleared a few of the north-south streets through the town so they could move supplies forward. Lorries, some of their manufacture, others captured from the Nazis or the Soviets (some of those Russian-made, others American) rolled along, as if no enemies were to be found for a thousand kilometers.

  I may not be much of an enemy, but I’m the best the Soviet Union has here, Ludmila thought. She worked her flaps and rudder, heeled the U-2 over into an attack run on the lorry column she’d spotted.

  No one in the column spotted her until she was close enough to open fire. “The mosquito stings!” she hollered, and whooped with glee as Lizards bailed out of the lorries and dove for cover.

  Some of them didn’t bail out—some shot back. Bullets snarled past the U-2. Ludmila kept boring in. She pulled the bomb-release handle. The aircraft suddenly got lighter and more maneuverable as weight and drag fell away.

  She gunned it for every ruble it was worth, although, with the Kukuruznik, such things were better measured in kopecks. The biplane shook slightly as the bombs exploded behind it. Ludmila looked back over her shoulder. Some of the lorries were burning merrily. Between them and the little bomb craters she’d made, the Lizards wouldn’t be moving much forward on that route for a while.

  Pity the U-2 could carry only light bombs. “I don’t just want to block off one road for a while,” Ludmila said, as if a witch might hear and grant her wish. “I want to keep the Lizards from using the whole city.”

  What she wanted and what she could do, sadly, were not one and the same. She flew over Kaluga at rooftop height—not that many of the gutted houses and factories still had roofs—shooting at whatever targets she saw. None was as good as that first line of lorries.

  The Lizards shot back. After a while, they started shooting the instant she came into range, sometimes before she opened up herself, Time to go, she thought. The Lizards used many more radios than the Red Army did; they must have spread the word that she was buzzing around.

  She got out of Kaluga as fast as she could, ducking down between ruined buildings to make herself as nearly unhittable as she could. It must have worked; she escaped with no more damage than a few bullet holes through the fabric covering of the U-2’s wings and fuselage.

  She flew off toward the west; the Lizards had to know the air base lay in that direction, and flying into the afternoon sun made her a harder target for gunners in Kaluga. But she zigzagged around a half-burned grove of plum t
rees and then headed east and north toward the front. With not much standing between the Lizards and Moscow, she had to do all she could, however little that was, to stem the tide of their advance.

  Wreckage littered the ground north of Kaluga, the all-too-familiar signs of a Soviet army in disintegration: shattered tanks and armored cars, trench lines reduced to craters by artillery, unburied corpses in khaki. Even zooming by at full throttle, she gagged at the stink of death and decay that filled her nostrils.

  Far less Lizard wreckage was strewn about. The Lizards made a point of salvaging their damaged equipment, which accounted for some of the disparity. But most of it sprang from their losing a lot less than their opponents had. That had been a constant of the war since its earliest days.

  Artillery boomed and flashed, off toward the east. The Lizards’ guns outranged those of the Red Army, too; from north of Kaluga, they could all but reach Moscow. Ludmila flew toward the guns. If she could shoot up the crews, that would be a good part of a day’s work.

  Though retreating, the Red Army hadn’t given up the fight. She heard screams in the air; a ragged pattern of explosions tore up a square kilometer of ground not far ahead of the Kukuruznik “Katyushas!” she cried in high glee. The rockets were some of the best weapons the Soviets had. Unlike more conventional artillery, they were easily portable, and a flight of them not only did a lot of damage but also spread terror.

  Some Lizards were just emerging from their hidey-holes after the Katyusha salvo when Ludmila flew by. She opened up with her machine gun. The Lizards dove back into cover. She hoped some of them weren’t fast enough to reach it, but was gone before she could be sure.

  As she approached the Lizards’ artillery position, she got down below treetop height. Some of those gun stations had tank chassis with antiaircraft cannon mounted in place of big guns protecting them. If she spotted one of those, she’d sheer off. A hit or two from their shells would turn the U-2 to kindling. She deliberately thought about it in terms of the aircraft rather than herself.