Tilting The Balance (88 page)

That was an understatement. The patter and clatter of incoming rounds all but deafened Drefsab. He said, “The area close to the wall is too built up to let us land and take aboard those of our males who still live.” He added the interrogative cough to that, though it looked pretty plain to him. Maybe the pilot would tell him he was wrong.

But the pilot didn’t “We could fit the fuselages of our marines down there, superior sir, but the rotors -” He didn’t finish the sentence, but Drefsab had no trouble finishing it for him. The pilot went on, “We do still have fuel enough to return to Italia, where the Race holds unchallenged control.” He sounded hopeful.

“No,” Drefsab said flatly. He reached into a pouch on his belt, took out a vial of ginger, and tasted. The pilot and weapons officer gaped at him. He didn’t care. Atvar the fleetlord knew he was addicted, so what these low-grade officers thought mattered not at all to him. He said, “We shall not flee.”

“But, superior sir-” The pilot broke off, perhaps because of drilled subordination, perhaps because he couldn’t decide whether to protest Drefsab’s tactics or the vial of ginger he still held so blatantly in his left hand.

Ginger certainty and ginger cunning rushed through Drefsab. “The Big Uglies can’t have brought all that many males into the fortress,” he said. “If we land behind them, where we took off, we can catch them between two fires, as they’ve done with our males down there.”

Now the pilot had something concrete to which to object: “But, superior sir, we’ve twenty-three effectives at most; I don’t know if anyone aboard the other helicopters is wounded.”

“Thirty,” Drefsab corrected, his voice cold. “Pilots and weapons officers have their personal weapons, and I have mine. If we can drive the Big Uglies from the fortress, we may be able to hold on here long enough for reinforcements to arrive.”

The pilot was still staring. Drefsab deliberately looked away from him, daring him to protest further. To underline his contempt, he tasted again. Ginger filled him with the burning urge to do something and with the confidence that if he just acted boldly, everything would turn out fine.

“Back to the landing area,” he snapped.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” the pilot said miserably. He relayed Drefsab’s command to the other two helicopters.

When the helicopters darted away, Jager hoped with all his heart they were fleeing. But, though the engine noise diminished, it didn’t vanish.

“Where are they going?” he muttered suspiciously. He couldn’t believe they would just up and fly away, not when they’d done such a job of working over the humans’ positions moments before. He tried to think himself into the head of the Lizard commander – Drefsab, Skorzeny had said his name was. The exercise had proved useful over and over again in the Soviet Union. If you could figure out what the other fellow needed to do, you were halfway to keeping him from doing it.

All right, assume this Drefsab was no fool. He wouldn’t be, not if he’d made the Lizards shape up in Besangon (Jager wondered how his regiment was faring; the news out of France – and then out of Germany – hadn’t been good) and been entrusted with swinging the Croats away from Germany.

What to do, then? Those big Lizard helicopters carried soldiers as well as munitions. What would Skorzeny do if he had some men he could put anywhere he wanted? The answer to that formed of itself in Jager’s mind: he’d stick them up the enemy’s rear. He’d done just that, here in Split.

Next question was, would Skorzeny figure that out for himself? He’d better.

Jager couldn’t get in touch with him by radio or field telephone. But Skorzeny was no fool, either. He’d think of something like that… Jager told himself hopefully.

The panzer colonel wondered if he ought to head back toward the rear. Before he made up his mind, he decided to evaluate the position he already held. He moved toward the window, peered out from well back in the room so as not to make himself an obvious target for the Lizards by the wall.

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. Jager 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 Besangon 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, Jager 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, Jager 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,” Jager 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!”

Jager shouted as loud as he could – if the Croat understood any German, that would be it.

“Stop that!” Skorzeny echoed, even louder than Jager. “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 Jager. 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.

Jager 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 J a’ger 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. Jager gestured to the Lizard: a peremptory come-here. The Lizard skittered over to stand beside him.

“Good,” Skorzeny said softly. He turned to Petrovic, raised 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. Jager 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. Jager 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,” Jager 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 shelli. 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 machinegun ammunition Schultz had filled.