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For all their good points, 88s had drawbacks, too. They couldn’t fire shells as heavy as the larger guns, and they couldn’t throw the shells they did fire as far. That meant-
“We’ll probably see action in the next few kilometers,” Jager said.
“Bumping up against whatever the artillery boys are shooting at, you mean, sir?” Meinecke said. At Jager’s nod, he went on, “Makes sense to me. Besides, south of Rouffach is where they told us we’d start running into the enemy, isn’t it? They have to be right once in a while.”
“Your confidence in the High Command does you credit, Sergeant,” Jager said dryly, which set the gunner and the loader to laughing again. “I just hope the Lizards use the same kind of flank guards we did when we got stretched thin fighting the Russians.”
“How’s that,Herr Oberst?” Meinecke asked. “Me, I was playing games with the Tommies in the desert before they stuck me in the Flying Circus here.” When Panther and Tiger panzers started rolling off the assembly lines, theWehrmacht put only the best crewmen into them.
“You, you didn’t miss a thing,” Jager said, mimicking his gunner’s diction. “But sometimes we’d have to concentrate our German troops at theSchwerpunkt, the decisive place, and cover our flanks with Romanians or Hungarians or Italians.”
“God save us.” Wolfgang Eschenbach used up half his daily quota of speech.
“They weren’t the worst soldiers I’ve ever seen,” Jager said. “They might not have been bad at all if they were decently equipped. But sometimes the Russians managed to hit them instead of us, and it got pretty ugly. I’m hoping the Lizards are concentrating all their best troops up where they’re trying to advance. I’d just as soon not have to fight the first team all the time.”
“Amen to that,” Eschenbach said; Jager confidently expected him to fall silent till the morning.
The colonel stood up in the cupola again. That was a good way to get shot, but it was also far and away the best way to see what was going on, and if you didn’t know what was going on, you had no business commanding a panzer, let alone a (rather battered) regiment of them. Slamming the lid down and peering through the periscopes made you feel safer, but it also made you miss things that were liable to get you killed.
Northbound shells whistled overhead, undoubtedly the Lizards’ response to the Germans’ 88s. Jager hoped the artillerymen had moved their pieces elsewhere before the shells came down on them.
The countryside began to have the look of a land at war: wrecked and burned farm buildings, smashed trees, bloated dead animals, shell craters pocking fields. Jager clucked sadly at the charred wreck of a German half-track. The Panther rolled past trenches and foxholes that showed the earlier limits of the German push to the south.
Stooping to get down into the turret for a moment, Jager said, “We’re moving forward, anyhow.” Against the Lizards, that was no small novelty, and boosted his hopes that they had only second-line troops on their flanks. Like a jack-in-the-box, he popped up out of the cupola again.
Through the rasping roar of the Panther’s big Maybach engine came the rattle of small-arms fire ahead. A couple of German MG42s were in action, their rapid rate of fire unmistakable-they sounded as if a giant were ripping enormous bolts of thick, tough cloth between his hands. Jager was glad the German infantry had the machine guns; since all Lizard foot soldiers carried automatic weapons, the poorLandsers needed all the help they could get.
The German panzers deployed for action, moving into their blunt wedge formation: two companies forward, Jager’s command panzer and another company in the middle to support them, and a fourth company in the rear as a reserve. They chewed brown, muddy lines through the green of growing crops.
Without warning, a streak of fire lanced through the air toward a Panzer IV in one of the lead companies. New Panzer IVs had long-barreled 75mm guns almost as good as the ones Panthers carried, but their armor, though thicker than in the earlier models, wasn’t excellent protection even against terrestrial foes. Against a Lizard anti-panzer rocket, the armor might as well not have been there at all. The Panzer IV brewed up, orange flame billowing and a column of thick black smoke mounting swiftly into the air.
Confused, angry shouts filled the radio. Jager grabbed the headset, shoved the earphones into place, and shouted orders into the microphone. The nearest surviving panzer poured machine-gun fire into the thick clump of bushes from which the anti-panzer rocket had come, hoping to flush out or knock down the Lizards who had fired it.
Nothing without armor could have survived that hail of bullets. From more than four hundred meters farther to the rear, Jager watched the bushes writhe under it, as if under torture. But a moment later, another rocket incinerated a German panzer.
“They’ve got one of their troop carriers in there!” Jager shouted into the microphone. “Give ’em your main armament.” Unlike German half-tracks, the Lizards’ armored troop carriers bore light cannon that could chew up anything this side of a panzer, and carried those rockets on turret rails to either side of the cannon. With them, the troop carriers became deadly dangerous panzer killers.
But, while they were formidably armed, they were only lightly armored. They could withstand small-arms fire, but when a panzer shell came knocking, they opened up. The German panzer hit the brakes to fire into that stand of bushes. Moments later, the bushes went up in flames as part of the troop carrier’s funeral pyre.
Jager whooped like a Red Indian. He remembered all too well the bad days of the summer before, when killing any Lizard armored vehicle seemed to require divine intervention. He’d done it himself once, with the 50mm cannon of a Panzer III, but he didn’t pretend he’d been anything but lucky.
Yet another rocket streaked out from cover and smote a Panzer IV. The rocket exploded in a ball of flame, but the panzer did not brew up. Jager whooped again. “TheSchurzen work!” he shouted to the world at large. The hollow-charge warheads of the Lizards’ anti-panzer rockets sent a jet of white-hot flame through armor and into a panzer. Some bright engineer had figured out that 5mm plates-“skirts,” he called them-welded onto a panzer’s turret and sides would make the rocket warhead go off prematurely and dissipate that jet. Now Jager saw that the bright idea actually worked in combat.
The advancing German panzers kept on spraying the Lizard infantry positions with machine-gun bullets. Covered by that, German infantrymen ran forward, too. The only opposing fire came from small arms. Jager’s hopes rose, if the Lizards didn’t have any panzers in this sector, theWehrmacht really could make some gains. He hadn’t taken the brass seriously when they talked about getting Mulhouse back and cutting the Lizards off from the Rhine, but he was starting to think that just might happen.
Then three Lizard helicopters popped up from behind cover, two from out of clearings in the woods and the third from behind a barn. Jager’s mouth went dry; helicopters were deadlier foes than panzers. They launched t
wo rockets each. One blew a hole in the ground. The other five hit German panzers. Two of the machines survived, but the other three went up in flames. A couple of crewmen managed to bail out of escape hatches; most perished.
Then 20mm rapid-fire antiaircraft guns started hammering at the helicopters. On the raid that captured the plutonium from the Lizards, the Germans who’d joined with the Russian partisans had carried a mountain version of one of those guns, which broke down into man-portable loads. Now theWehrmacht made a habit of posting the light guns as far forward as possible, to hold helicopters at bay.
The tactic worked. The helicopters sheered away from the antiaircraft guns. One of them was trailing smoke, though it kept flying. Jager prayed for it to fall from the sky, but it refused.
The two lead panzer companies were already through what had been the Lizards’ front line. They hadn’t cleared up all the holdouts; a bullet cracked past Jager’s head and several more ricocheted off the Panther. Like any sensible soldiers, the Lizards were trying to pick off the panzer commanders. For the time being, Jager ducked down into the Panther turret.
“We’re driving them,” he said, fixing his eyes to the periscopes that gave him vision even when buttoned up. “With luck, maybe we can push far enough to get in among their artillery and do them some real harm.”
Just then a Lizard troop carrier that had lain low opened up with a rocket and took out a panzer less than a hundred meters from Jager’s. By luck, he was looking through the periscope that showed where the rocket had come from. “Panzer halt!” he shouted, and then, “Armor-piercing!”
“Armor-piercing.” Wolfgang Eschenbach had a dispensation to exceed his daily word quota if in the line of duty. Grunting a little, he lifted a black-tipped shell and set it in the breech of the Panther’s cannon.
“Bearing three hundred degrees, range seven hundred meters, maybe a little less,” Jager said.
The turret slewed anticlockwise. “I see him, sir,” Klaus Meinecke said. “Behind those bushes,ja?”
