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Telerep cut him down with machine-gun fire. Ussmak ran over the carcass, smashing it into the grass and dirt. His jaws opened wide. Votal was avenged. The landcruiser formation rolled on across the steppe.
Even the smallest noise or flicker of motion in the sky drew Heinrich Jager’s complete and concerned-he was too stubborn to admit to a word like fearful-attention. This time, it was just a linnet flitting past, chirping as it went. This time.
He had three tanks left, three tanks and a combat group of infantry. “Combat group” was the Wehrmacht way of describing odds and ends of military meat pressed together in the hope of turning out a sausage. Sometimes it even worked-but when it did, the sausage went right back into the meat grinder again.
Another motion across the sky turned out to be another bird. Jager shook his head. He could feel how jumpy he was getting. But the Lizards’ aircraft didn’t have to be right overhead to kill. The company had learned that, too, to its sorrow.
He managed something halfway between a laugh and a cough, leaned down into the turret. “I wonder if the Ivans felt this naked after we smashed so many of their planes on the ground last year,” he said.
“If they did, they hid it damned well,” his gunner answered. Georg Schultz wore the ribbon for a wound badge, too.
“So do we-I hope,” Jager said.
A squad of infantry was posted on a swell of ground a few hundred meters in front of the tanks. One of the foot soldiers turned and waved urgently. The signal meant only one thing-Lizard panzers, heading across the steppe. Jager’s testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. Schultz looked up at him. The gunner was dirty and unshaven. “We must try,” he said. “For the Fatherland.”
“For the Fatherland,” Jager echoed. Given that the alternative was bailing out of his tank and trying to foot it across the Ukraine through Lizards and partisans both, fighting for the Fatherland looked like the best bet he had. He leaned down into the turret, called to Dieter Schmidt: “To the prepared position.”
The Panzer III slowly rumbled forward. So did the other two survivors of the tank company. In slots dug into the reverse slope of the rise, they exposed only the tops of their turrets to the enemy. Jager stood up in the cupola, peered ahead with field glasses. He took even fewer chances than he had against the Russians. Shrubs tied to his leather headgear broke up his outline; he used his free hand to shield the binoculars so no sun reflected off their lenses.
Sure enough, there were the Lizards, eight or ten tanks’ worth, with more vehicles scurrying along behind to support them. Jager recognized the ones with small turrets as troop carriers, on the order of the German SdKfz 251 but far more dangerous-they could fight his panzers on largely even terms. And the Lizards’ tanks…
“You know what’s the funny thing, Georg?” he said as he lowered himself once more.
“Tell me anything funny about the Lizards, Herr Major,” the gunner grunted. “I will laugh I promise you.”
“They’re lousy tankers,” Jager said. He was a lousy tankman himself, but only in the literal sense of the word. No one who was lousy in the metaphorical sense could have lasted almost a year on the eastern front.
Sure enough, Schultz laughed. “They’ve been good enough to kick our ass.”
“It’s the panzers, not the crews,” Jager insisted. “They have better guns than ours, better armor, and God only knows how they make engines that don t smoke But tactics-pfui?” He curled his lip in disdain. “The Russians have better sense. They just motor along shooting at anything that happens to cross their path. They aren’t even looking this way, though it’s an obvious place for trouble. Stupid!”
“No doubt a run through the Panzer Lehr training division would improve their skill, Herr Major,” Schultz said dryly. “But if the tanks themselves are good enough, how good do the tankers have to be?”
Jager grunted. It was a cogent question. In Panzer IIIs, little Pimpfs from the Hitler Youth, boys too young to shave, could have taken out whole divisions of British tanks from the. Great War: the rhomboidal monsters were too slow to run and too lightly armed to fight. He’d thought the Panzer III a great tank until he ran up against his first Russian T-34, and a good tank even afterward. Now-now he might as well have been in one of those obsolete rhomboids himself.
“We do what we can, Georg,” he said. The gunner nodded.
Jager stuck his head out of the cupola again. The Lizards were trundling happily past his strongpoint, no more than five hundred meters away, without the slightest idea he was there. He glanced over to Ernst Riecke and Uwe Tannenwald, his other surviving tank commanders, and held up one finger. Both men waved to show they understood. Hanging around for more than one shot against the Lizards was an invitation to a funeral.
The company commander pointed to one of the troop carriers. “That one, Georg,” he said quietly.
“Ja,” the gunner said. He spoke to the loader. “Armor-piercing.”
“Armor-piercing,” Stefan Fuchs echoed. He pulled the black-tipped round out of the ammunition rack, loaded it into the five-centimeter gun, closed the breech.
The gunner traversed the turret a few degrees so it bore on the troop carrier. He took his eyes away from the gunsight for an instant to make sure Fuchs was clear of the recoil, then looked back and squeezed the trigger at almost the same time.
The cannon roared. Through his field glasses, Jager saw a hole appear in the troop carrier’s flank. “Hit!” he shrieked. The carrier slewed sideways, stopped. It was burning. A hatch came down in the rear. Lizards started bailing out. German foot soldiers opened up on them, picking them off as they emerged.
“Back!” Jager shouted. If he waited around to see how the foot soldiers did, one of those Lizard panzers would blow him to bits. Already, with terrifying speed, their turrets were traversing to bear on his position. Dieter Schmidt jammed the tank into reverse. It jounced down the low slope. So did Sergeant Tannenwald’s. Ernst Riecke was a split second too slow. Jager watched in dismay as the turret flew off his panzer and crushed an infantryman who was scrambling to get out of the way.
Later, Jager told himself, I’ll grieve. That assumed there would be a later for him. At the moment, the assumption looked bad. One of the things he’d learned fighting the Russians was to have more than one firing position available whenever he could. His second one was at the base of the rise.
“Maybe we’ll give ’em a surprise, Major,” Schultz said. He and Fuchs already had another AP round loaded and ready. The gun bore on the place where the Lizard panzers were likeliest to breast the rise.
A couple of foot soldiers dashed forward with satchel charges. That meant the tanks were close, then. Machine guns chattered furiously. An explosion sent up smoke and dirt, then another. Jager hoped the brave men hadn’t thrown away their lives for nothing.
Then he had no time for hope or fear, for a Lizard panzer nosed over the horizon right where he’d thought it would-the Lizards really were lousy tankmen. The Panzer III’s cannon roared as he drew in breath to yell, “Fire!”
Schultz was an artist with the long gun. He put the AP round right in the middle of the tiny bit of belly plate the enemy tank exposed as it came over the rise. The glacis plate laughed at even high-velocity five-centimeter shells. The belly plate, as on merely human panzers, was thinner. The shell pierced it. The tank stopped. They’ll have to take the driver out of there with a spoon, Jager thought.
Two Lizards popped out of the turret, one after the other. The hull machine gun from Jager’s tank cut them down.
Tannenwald’s tank had done almost as well as the company commander’s. Its first shot knocked the track off a Lizard panzer’s road wheels. The hit tank swerved, out of control. A foot soldier ran up to it, tossed a potato-masher grenade into the open cupola. Its small blast was followed an instant later by a big one as the panzer’s ammunition went off.
“Back again!” Jager told Schmidt. Already they’d hurt the Lizards worse in this engagement than ever before.
That was important, but it would matter only so much if he wound up dead… as he probably would as soon as a Lizard panzer made it onto the reverse slope of that little rise.
A scream in the sky-Death would come even without the Lizards’ tanks, then. Their aircraft were just as deadly. Jager resigned himself. Bombs burst all around-the other side of the rise, the side the Lizards were still climbing.
“Stuka!” Georg Schultz screamed in the voice of a man who knows himself reprieved.
“By God, it is,” Jager said. He, by contrast, spoke softly, for he could scarcely believe he might yet live a while longer. The Lizards had taken as dreadful a toll on the Luftwaffe as on the Wehrmacht. But this pilot, somehow, had still got his dive-bomber into the air and still had the nerve to fly it straight down the Lizards’ throats.
More bombs went off in quick succession-he’d loosed the whole stick. Only a direct hit would take out a panzer, but even experienced tankers had to hesitate before advancing through that sudden storm of explosives.
The Stuka pilot couldn’t have been more than a hundred meters off the ground when he pulled out of his dive. Two of the Lizard panzers fired their guided rockets at him but the missiles shot harmlessly past his plane. He skimmed away, his landing gear just above the waving grass of the steppe.
