Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

Jager said, “That’s your fault. That madman raid on the Lizards in the Ukraine-” He shuddered. He hadn’t had a tank wrapped around him like an armored skin then.

“Ah, but you brought home the bacon, or half the rashers, anyhow,” Skorzeny said. “For that, you deserve everything you got.”

“Then you should be a colonel-general by now,” Jager retorted. Skorzeny grinned; the jagged scar that ran from the corner of his mouth toward his left ear pulled up with the motion of his cheek. Jager went on, “Here, do you have a cup? Drink some coffee with me. It’s vile, but it’s hot.”

Skorzeny pulled the tin cup from his mess kit. As he held it out, tie clicked his heels with mocking formality. “Danke sehr, Herr Oberst!”

“Thank me after you ye tasted it,” Jager said. The advice proved good; Skorzeny’s scar made the face he pulled seem only more hideous. Jager chuckled under his breath-wherever he’d seen Skorzeny, in Moscow, in the Ukraine, and now here, the man hadn’t cared a fig for military discipline. And now here-Jager’s gaze sharpened. “What does bring you here, Standartenfuhrer Skorzeny?” He used the formal SS title with less irony than he would have aimed at any other soldier of Hitler’s elite.

“I am going to get into Besancon,” Skorzeny announced, as if entering the Lizard-held city were as easy as a stroll around the block.

“Are you?” Jager said noncommittally. Then he brightened. “Did you have anything to do with that bomb last week? I hear it took out one of their panzers, maybe two.”

“Petty sabotage has its place, but I do not engage in it.” Skorzeny grinned again, this time like a predator. “My sabotage is on the grand scale. I aim to buy something of value which one of our little scaly friends is interested in selling. I have the payment here.” He reached over his shoulder, patted his knapsack.

Jager jabbed: “They trust you to carry gold without disappearing?”

“O ye of little faith.” Skorzeny sipped the not-quite-coffee again. “That is without a doubt the worst muck I have ever drunk in my life. No, the Lizards care nothing for gold. I have a kilo and a half of ginger in there, Jager.”

“Ginger?” Jager scratched his head. “I don’t understand?”

“Think of it as morphine, if you like, then, or perhaps cocaine,” Skorzeny said. “Once the Lizards get a taste for it, they’ll do anything to get more, and anything includes, in this case, one of the rangefinders that make their panzers so deadly accurate.”

“Better than what we have in the Panther?” Jager set an affectionate hand on the road wheel of the brush-covered machine parked by the fire. “It’s a big step up from what they put into my old Panzer III.”

“Get ready for a bigger step, old son,” Skorzeny said. “I don’t know all the details, but I do know it’s a whole new principle.”

“Can we use it if you get it?” Jager asked. “Some of the things the Lizards use seem good only for driving our own scientists mad.” He thought of his own brief and unhappy stay with the physicists who were trying to turn the explosive metal he and Skorzeny had stolen into a bomb.

If Skorzeny had that same thought, he didn’t show it. “I don’t worry about such things. That’s not my job, no more than setting foreign policy for the Reich. My job is getting the toys so other people can play with them.”

“That is a sensible way for a soldier to look at the world.” After a couple of seconds, Jager wished he hadn’t said that. He’d believed it wholeheartedly until he found out how the SS went about massacring Jews: someone had given them that job, and they went ahead and did it without worrying about anything else. He changed the subject: “All right, you’re going into Besancon to get this fancy new rangefinder. How do you expect me to help? We’re still close to eighty kilometers north of it, and if I roll out my panzers for an attack, they’ll all be scrap metal before I get a quarter of the way there. Or have you arranged for your Lizard who likes ginger so well to sell you all their rangefinders instead of just one?”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Skorzeny slugged back the rest of his coffee, made a horrible face. “This Dreck is even worse after it cools down. Damn, Jager, you disappoint me. I expected you to run me right down the Grande Rue in Besancon and on to the citadel, cannon blazing.”

“Good luck,” Jager blurted before he realized the other man was joking.

“How’s this, then?” Skorzeny said, chuckling still. “Suppose you lay on an attack-a few panzers, artillery, infantry, whatever you can afford to expend and seem convincingly aggressive without hurting your defense too much-on the eastern half of the front. I want you to draw as much attention as you can away from the western section, where I, a simple peasant, shall pedal my bicycle-you do have a bicycle around here for me to pedal, don’t you? — into Lizard-held territory and on down to Besancon. I have a way to get word to you when I shall require a similar diversion to aid my return.”

Jager thought about the men and equipment he would lose in a pair of diversionary assaults. “The rangefinder is as good as all that?” he asked.

“So I’ve been told.” Skorzeny gave him a fishy stare. “Would you prefer formal written orders, Colonel? I assure you, that can be arranged. I’d hoped to rely more on our previous acquaintance.”

“No, I don’t need formal orders,” Jager said, sighing. “I shall do as you say, of course. I only hope this rangefinder is worth the blood it will cost.”

“I hope the same thing. But we won’t find out unless I get the gadget, will we?”

“No.” Jager sighed again. “When do you want us to put in the diversionary attack, Herr Standartenfuhrer?”

“Do what you need to do, Herr Oberst,” Skorzeny answered. “I don’t want you to go out there and get slaughtered because you hadn’t shifted enough artillery and armor. Will three days give you enough time to prepare?”

“I suppose so. The front is narrow, and units won’t have far to travel.” Jager also knew, but could not mention, that the more men and machines he fed into the assault, the more would be expended. War assumed expending soldiers. The trick was to keep from expending them on things that weren’t, worth the price.

He moved men, panzers, and artillery mostly by night, to keep the Lizards from noticing what he was up to. He didn’t completely fool them; their artillery picked up on the eastern sector of the front, and an air strike incinerated a couple of trucks towing 88mm antitank guns caught out in the open. But most of the shift went through without a hitch.

At 0500 on the morning of the appointed day, with dawn staining the eastern sky, artillery began flinging shells at the Lizards’ positions near the Chateau de Belvoir. Rifle-carrying men in field gray loped forward. Jager, standing up in the cupola as a good panzer commander should, braced himself as his Panther rumbled ahead.

The Lizards’ advance positions, being lightly held, were soon overrun, though not before one of the aliens turned a Panzer IV to Jager’s right to a funeral pyre with a rocket. He didn’t see any enemy panzers, for which he thanked God; intelligence said they’d pulled back toward Besancon after the rough time he’d given them in their latest attack.

But even without armor, the Lizards were a handful. Jager hadn’t pushed forward more than a couple of kilometers before a helicopter rose into the sky and peppered his force with rockets and machine-gun fire. Another panzer, this one a Tiger, brewed up. He winced-not only a powerful new machine, but also a veteran crew, gone forever. A lot of foot soldiers were down, too.