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“Fuel pump aside,” Jager said, giving his Panther an affectionate thwack, “this is the best human-made panzer in the world.” The crewmen of the Tigers attached to his unit glared at him, as he’d known they would. They liked their massive beasts’ 88mm gun better than the Panther’s 75, even if the Panther was more maneuverable and had its armor properly sloped.
“But,” Jager went on, and let the word hang in the air, “if you try to fight the Lizards straight up with your machines, the only thing you’ll do is get yourselves killed. The Fatherland can’t afford that. Remember it. Think of yourselves as going up against T-34s in a Panzer II.”
That got their attention in the way he wanted. Next to one of the tough Soviet machines, a Panzer II, with its 20mm cannon and cardboard-thin protection, was a crew’s worth of “sad duty to inform you” letters waiting to happen. And yet, despite technical shortcomings, the Wehrmacht had advanced deep into Russia.
“We’ll try to hit them from ambush, then,” Jager said. “We’ll lure them, put some of our panzers where we can get a shot at them from flank or rear. You all know how to do that; you’ve most of you done it on the Eastern Front.” He was glad he had picked crews here. Sending new fish against the Lizards would have been an invitation to slaughter. Casualties would be bad enough as things were.
“Their equipment will be better than ours,” he emphasized. “Their tactics and doctrine won’t. From what I saw in the Ukraine last year, they’re even more stereotyped than the Bolsheviks, but their equipment is so good, they’ll hurt you if you make any mistakes at all. In fact, they’ll hurt you even if you don’t make any mistakes. As tankers they’re nothing much, but if I had a chance to capture one of their panzers, I’d give up a lot to do it. Questions?”
“Will we have any air support?” one of the Tiger crewmen asked.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Jager answered dryly. “Anything we put up, they knock down.” He thought about Ludmila Gorbunova in her little flying sewing machine. He hadn’t had any reply to the latest letter he’d posted. With the state of the mails these days, that meant nothing, but he worried all the same. Going into the air against the Lizards was more nearly suicidal than fighting them in panzers.
The same tanker asked, “We’ll see their helicopters, though, won’t we?”
“If you already know the answer, why ask the question?” Jager said. “Yes, we probably will. If you hear one and it hasn’t spied you, get under tree cover as fast as you can. If a panzer in your squad blows up and you don’t think you’re in contact with the enemy, you’d better do the same. Anything else? No? Let’s go, then. Heil Hitler!”
Heil Hitler! the panzer crews chorused. They piled into their machines. Jager tried to gauge their attitude. They weren’t confident of victory any more, the way they had been before the blows against the Poles or the French or the Russians. They all knew what the Lizards could do.
But no one hung hack or hesitated. Better to hold the Lizards as far from the Fatherland as possible: they all knew that. Without much hope and without fear, they’d try to accomplish it.
Jager climbed up onto the turret of his Panther, slid down inside through the open cupola. Beneath and behind him, the big Maybach engine thundered into life. He wished it were a diesel like the ones the Russians used; a petrol power plant didn’t just burn when it got hit-it exploded.
“Down the road southwest,” he told the driver over the intercom. “We’re looking for good defensive positions, remember. We want to be in ambush before we run into the Lizards nosing north from Besancon.”
As seemed their habit since the blitzkrieg that followed their arrival on Earth, the Lizards were moving on Belfort slowly and methodically-with luck, even more slowly than they’d planned, because they had a way of overreacting to harassment fire from German infantry and French guerrillas. With more luck, Jager’s panzer regiment-panzer combat group was a better name for it, given the mixed and mixed-up nature of his command-would slow them further. With a whole lot more luck, he might even stop them.
The Panther had a much smoother ride than the Panzer III in which he’d advanced into Russia. The interleaved road wheels had a lot to do with that. Not feeling as if his kidneys were shaking loose was a pleasant novelty. Now if the damned fuel pump wouldn’t keep breaking down…
In spite of the engine’s rumble and the rattle and squeak and grind of the treads, riding with his head and shoulders out of the cupola was pleasant on a bright spring day. New grass sprouted in meadows and in cracks in the macadam of the road. In a normal year, traffic would have smashed that latter hopeful growth flat, but the column of German panzers might have been the first motorized traffic the road had known in months. Here and there in the grass, wildflowers made bright splashes of red and yellow and blue. The air itself smelled green and growing.
To Jager’s right, Klaus Meinecke sneezed sharply, once, twice, three times. The gunner pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his tunic, and let out a long, mournful honk. “I hate springtime,” he mumbled. His eyes were puffy and tracked with red. “Miserable hay fever kills me every year.”
Nothing makes everybody happy, Jager thought. They ran through Montbeliard, where the big Peugeot works stood idle for want of fuel and raw materials, then followed the road that paralleled the Doubs River southwest toward Besancon-and toward the Lizards surely on the way. up toward Belfort.
Jager’s head swiveled up and down, back and forth, watching every moment for the airplane or helicopter that could turn his panzer into a funeral pyre. Meinecke chuckled. “You’ve got the deutsche Blick all right, Colonel,” he said.
“The German glance?” Jager echoed, puzzled. “What’s that?”
“They recruited me for Panthers out of the Afrika Korps, not the Russian war,” the gunner explained. “It was a joke we made there, a takeoff on the deutsche Gruss, the German salute. We were always on the lookout for aircraft, first British, then from the Lizards. Spot one and it was time to find a hole in the ground.”
Before the Lizards came, Jager had envied the tankers who fought in North Africa. The war against the British there was clean, gentlemanly-war as it should be, he thought. Both sides in Russia had fought as viciously as they could. Jager thought of the massacres of Jews at Babi Yar and other places. A miracle the Polish Jews hadn’t killed him on his way back to Germany.
He didn’t care to brood on that too long; it made him wonder about what his country had been doing in the lands it had conquered. Instead he said, “So what was it like in the desert after the Lizards came?”
“Bad,” Meinecke answered. “We’d been beating the British, they were brave, but their panzers didn’t match up to ours, and their tactics were pretty bad. If we’d had proper supplies, we’d have mopped them up, but everything kept going to the Eastern Front.”
“We never had enough, either,” Jager put in.
“Maybe not, Colonel, but a lot even of what was supposed to go to us ended up on the bottom of the Mediterranean. But you asked about the Lizards. They mopped up the Tommies and us both. They liked the desert, and we couldn’t hide from their planes there. Talk about the deutsche Blick-Gott in Himmel! The Tommies had it, too.”
“Misery loves company,” Jager said. Then, still looking around,’ he suddenly called “Halt!” to the Panther’s driver.
The big battle tank slowed, stopped. Jager stood tall in the cupola, waving the column to a halt behind him. He studied the little ridge that rose off to one side of the road. It was covered with old brush and saplings, and its crest could have been more than four hundred meters from the roadway. He’d have to scout out what lay behind, check his line of retreat-the one thing you couldn’t do was stand toe-to-toe with the Lizards, or before long you wouldn’t have any toes left.
He ordered the Panther up the rise to the crest. The longer he looked at the setup, the better he liked it. He didn’t think he’d come across a better defensive position, anyhow.
At his comma
nd, most of the German panzers deployed hull down on the reverse slope of the ridge line. He sent three or four Panzer IVs and a Tiger forward to meet the Lizards ahead of his main position and, with luck, bring them back all unsuspecting into the ambush he’d set up.
That left nothing to do but wait and stay alert. In back of the ridge lay a pond fed by a small stream. A fish leaped out of the water after a fly, fell back with a splash. Somewhere in his gear, Jager had a couple of hooks and a length of light line. Pan-fried trout or pike sounded a lot better to him than the miserable rations he’d been eating.
A Frenchman in civilian clothes came out of the bushes on the far side of the pond. Jager wasn’t surprised to see he had a rifle on his back. He waved to the Frenchman, who returned the gesture before stepping back into the undergrowth. Before the Lizards came, the French underground had nipped at the Germans who occupied their country. Now they worked together against the new invaders: in French eyes, the Germans were the lesser of two evils.
That’s something, anyhow, Jager thought. In Poland, the Lizards had seemed the lesser of two evils to the Jews. From what he’d learned, he couldn’t blame them for feeling that way.
A couple of times, he’d tried talking with officers he trusted about what Germany had done in the east. It hadn’t worked: he’d been met by a refusal to listen that almost amounted to saying, I don’t want to know. He hadn’t brought up the subject now for some time.
Away in the distance, he heard the harsh, abrupt bark of a panzer cannon. At the same time, a shout sounded in his earphones: “Engaging lead element of enemy panzer column! Will attempt to carry out plan as outlined. Will-” The transmission cut off abruptly; Jager feared he knew why.
More booms: from the Panzer IV’s 75mm guns; heavier, deeper ones from the Tiger’s 88; and, sharp as thunderclaps, from the Lizards’ cannon. Then another sort of roar, lower and more diffuse, with smaller blasts and cheery pop-pops all mixed in with it. That was the sound of a panzer brewing up.
“Armor-piercing,” Jager said quietly. The loader slammed a black-nosed shell into the breech of the cannon. Out of sight down the road, another panzer exploded. Jager bit his lip; those were men, comrades-in-arms, dying nastily. And the officer part of him whispered, if all my panzers get killed before any make it back here, what good is my ambush? He was inured to sacrificing men; throwing them away was something else again.
He stood up in the cupola, made a hand sign: be ready. Panzer commanders passed it down the line. He didn’t want to use radio, not now. The Lizards were too good at picking up their foes signals. As if from very far away he felt his heart thudding in his chest, his bowels loosening. That was what fear did to your body. It didn’t have to rule you if you didn’t let it.
Up the road, motor going flat out, men inside probably shaken to blood pudding, raced a Panzer IV. It sounded like an explosion in a smithy, roaring and clattering and clanking as if it were about to fall to pieces.
Behind it, almost silent by comparison, glided a Lizard panzer, then another and another and another. Jager knew they were toying with the Panzer IV. They had a way of stabilizing their guns so they shot accurately even on the move, but they were enjoying the chase for a while before they ended it.
Let’s see how they enjoy this, he thought, and yelled, “Fire!”
Because his head was outside the cupola, the bellow of the cannon half stunned him. Flame and smoke spurted from the gun’s muzzle. “Hit!” he cried in delight. It was a solid hit, too, right at the join between the turret and body of the Lizard panzer. The turret tilted, almost torn out of its ring; Jager wouldn’t have wanted to be inside when that 6.8-kilo round came knocking.
But the Lizards made their panzers tough. That shell would have torn the turret right off a British tank or a Soviet T-34, and turned either of them into an inferno on the instant. Not only did this one not catch fire, its driver threw it into reverse and did his best to escape the trap in which he found himself. “Hit him again!” Jager shouted. His gunner required no urging-the second shot punctuated Jager’s sentence.
All the rest of the hull-down German panzers along the ridge line opened up, too. The Lizards offered them a target tankers dream about: the less heavily armored flanks and engine compartments of their vehicles. One of those vehicles brewed up in a flash of orange and blue flame-somebody’s round had penetrated to something vital. Jager wondered if that had been a Panther’s kill or a Tiger’s: the heavier panzer’s 88 fired a correspondingly more massive shell, but the Panther’s gun had a higher muzzle velocity and would pierce just as much armor, maybe more.
The Lizards did not react well to being taken in flank. Jager had counted on that: they were even more vulnerable to the unexpected than Soviet troops. For a crucial few seconds, they either tried to back out of trouble like the panzer Jager had hit or traversed their turrets toward the concealed German armor without shifting the tanks themselves. That let the Germans keep pounding away at their more vulnerable sides and rears. Another Lizard panzer turned into a fireball, then another.
But the Lizards did not stay stupid forever. One by one, they turned toward the Germans’ fire. No German panzer gun could beat their front glacis plates. Jager’s gunner tried. His shell buried itself almost to the drive bands, but did no damage anyone could find.
Then the aliens started shooting back. They had only small targets at which to aim, but they didn’t need anything big: their fire-control arrangements were even better than the ones the new Panthers boasted. And while a Panther shell couldn’t quite shift one of their turrets, the Lizards’ projectiles smashed German panzer turrets as if they were anvils dropping on cockroaches.
Two tanks down from Jager, a Panzer IV was abruptly beheaded. Shells cooking off inside, its turret smashed down the rear slope of the ridge and skidded into the pond. The hull exploded in flames, too, and started a fire in the brush.
Then a Tiger got hit. Its turret flew off, too, which rocked Jager; he’d hoped the 100mm of armor there might be proof against anything the Lizards could throw at it. No such luck, though. Now he got on the radio. “Fall back!” he ordered. Keep things moving, keep them confused: that was how you got whatever chance you had against the Lizards. In a set-piece battle, you were dead.
As if he were back on the other side of the rise, Jager saw what the Lizard panzer commander would be thinking: it they came straight up the slope and charged after the retreating Germans, they’d keep presenting their invulnerable frontal armor to his comrades and him. Then they could destroy the panzer force at their convenience and press on up the road toward Belfort.
He got on the command frequency again: “Peel off to either side as you’retreat. We’ll want to get some decent shots at their flanks when they come after us.”
His Panther backed through the little stream that fed the pond; water sprayed up on either side. Sure enough, just as he’d guessed, a couple of Lizard panzers breasted the rise and advanced on the Germans. They were too confident of their own invincibility; had he been an instructor on a training ground, he would have lowered their mark. The proper tactical solution was to stay hull down on the reverse slope and pound the Germans while exposing as little of themselves as possible.
He remembered his first big fight with the Lizard panzers, in the Ukraine. They’d made the same mistake then, and he’d killed one of their tanks with a Panzer III-he was one of a bare handful of German tankers who could say that.
This time, though, he didn’t get a chance to put a shell into the enemy’s belly, where his armor was thinnest. One of the Lizards fired. A Panzer IV went up in gouts of flame. But the Germans were hitting back, too, and their high-velocity armor-piercing shells could hurt the Lizards when they hit the right spot. One of the Lizard panzers slewed to a halt, road wheels wrecked by a shell. That made the machine only marginally less dangerous; its main armament still worked, and its turret swung toward a Panther. It took the German panzer out with one shell straight through the sloped front plat
e that was supposed to deflect enemy fire.
More rounds slammed into the disabled Lizard panzer. Hatches popped open in the turret and at the driver’s position in the front of the hull. Lizards jumped out Machine guns chattered. The Lizards went down. Jager felt some sympathy for them-they’d fought bravely, If not with a lot of brains. That didn’t keep him from yelling like a wild-west Indian when they fell.
A moment after the last Lizard bailed out and was shot down, the disabled panzer brewed up. A smoke ring, perfect as any an old man with a cigar in his mouth might make but twenty times as big, blew out of the commander’s open cupola. Then all the ammunition stowed in there must have cooked off at once, for the panzer went up in a fireball that sent blazing debris flying for a hundred meters.
A Lizard helicopter fluttered over the ridge just then, rockets stabbing out from it like knives of fire. Machine gunners opened up on it, but it was armed against their fire. But a Panzer IV, traversing its cannon toward the second Lizard tank, happened to line up on the flying machine. Jager never knew whether the commander gave the order or the gunner acted on his own initiative. Either way, the 75mm shell tore through the helicopter’s belly and swatted it out of the air in flames. Jager screamed with delight.
The commander of the other Lizard panzer that had come over the ridge should have pulled back then. The panzer’s turret swung back and forth, as if the Lizards inside couldn’t make up their minds on a target. The Germans had no such hesitation-and Panthers and Tigers, though far from a match for the Lizard machine, could hurt it when they got a chance like this one. Even the new Panzer IVs, though hideously vulnerable to return fire, had in their long 75s main armament little inferior to what the Panthers carried.
When the Lizard did decide to go back, it was too late. Smoke and almost transparent blue flames boiled from the enemy panzer’s engine compartment. That crew bailed out, too. Jager didn’t know if they all perished; the smoke was too thick for him to be sure. If they didn’t, though, it wasn’t for lack of effort.
