Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

He got in sight of the main. Lizard position outside the Chateau de Belvoir, lobbed a couple of high-explosive shells at the chateau itself (not without an inward pang at destroying old monuments; he’d thought of archaeology as a career until World War I sucked him into the army for good), and, having taken enough casualties to provide the diversion Skorzeny wanted, withdrew to lick his wounds and wait to be called on to sacrifice again.

“I hope the Lizards don’t follow us home,” Klaus Meinecke said as the Panther made its way back to the start line. “If they do, they’re liable to catch us with our pants down around our ankles.”

“Too true,” Jager said; the gunner had found an uncomfortably vivid way to put words to his own fears.

Maybe the Lizards suspected the Germans of trying to lure them into a trap. Whatever their reasons, they didn’t pursue. Jager gratefully seized the time they gave him to rebuild his defensive position. After that, he went back to watchful waiting, all the while wondering how Skorzeny was going to get word to him that he needed more strong young men thrown into the fire.

A week after the diversionary attack, a Frenchman in a tweed jacket, a dirty white shirt, and baggy black wool trousers came up to him, sketched a salute, and said, in bad German, “Our friend with the”-his finger traced a scar on his left cheek-“he needs the help you promise. Tomorrow morning, he say, is the good time. You understand?”

“Oui, monsieur Merci,” Jager answered. The Frenchman’s thin, intelligent face did not yield to a smile, but one eyebrow rose. He accepted a chunk of black bread, offering in exchange a swig of red wine from the flask on his belt. Then, without another word, he vanished back into the woods.

Jager got on the field telephone to the nearest Luftwaffe base. “Can you give me air support?” he asked. “When their damned helicopter gunships show up, I lose panzers I can’t spare.”

“When I go after those gunships, I lose aircraft I can’t spare,” the Luftwaffe man retorted, “and aircraft are just as vital to the defense of the Reich as panzers. Guten Tag.” The phone line went dead. Jager concluded he was not going to get his air support.

He didn’t. The attack went on nonetheless. It even had a moment of triumph, when Meinecke incinerated a Lizard infantry fighting vehicle with a well-placed round from the Panther’s long 75mm gun. But, on the whole, the Germans suffered worse than they had in the first diversionary assault. That had put the Lizards’ wind up, and they were ready and waiting this time. Maybe that meant they’d pulled some troops from the western section of their line. Jager hoped so; it would mean he was doing what he was supposed to.

When he’d soaked up enough casualties and damage to make the Lizards believe (with luck) he’d really tried to accomplish something, he retreated once more. No sooner had he returned to the jumping-off point than a runner came panting up and said, “Sir; there’s a Lizard panzer advancing on our front line about five kilometers west of here.”

“A Lizard panzer?” Jager said. The messenger nodded. Jager frowned. That wasn’t a bad as it might have been, but even one Lizard panzer made a formidable foe. Poor Skorzeny, he thought: they must have caught on to his scheme this time.

Then anger surged through him at having to mount diversionary attacks in support of a plan that hadn’t been likely to succeed anyhow.

“Sir, that’s not all,” the messenger said.

“What else, then?” Jager asked.

“The panzer has a white flag flying from above the drivers station, sir,” the fellow answered, with the air of a man reporting something he doesn’t expect to be believed. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

“This I must see with my own eyes,” Jager said. He hopped into a little Volkswagen light army car, waved the messenger in beside him as a guide, and headed west. He hoped he had enough petrol to get where he was going. The light army car’s engine put out less than twenty-five horsepower and didn’t use much petrol, but the Wehrmacht had little to spare, either.

As Jager drove, a suspicion began to form in the back of his mind. He shook his head. No, he told himself. Impossible. Not even Skorzeny could-

But Skorzeny had. When Jager and the messenger pulled up in front of the Lizard panzer, the driver’s hatch came open and the SS man squeezed out, wriggling and twisting like a circus elephant inching through a narrow doorway.

Jager gave him a formal military salute. That didn’t seem good enough, so he also took off his cap, which made Skorzeny grin his frightening grin. “I give up,” Jager said. “How the devil did you manage this?” Just stainding in front of the Lizard panzer was frightening to a man who’d faced its like in battle. Its smooth lines and beautifully sloped armor made every German panzer save possibly the Panther seem not merely archaic but ugly to boot. Staring down the barrel of its big main armament was like looking into a tunnel of death.

Before answering, Skorzeny writhed and twisted; Jager heard his back and shoulders crunch. “Better,” he said. “By God, I felt like a tinned sardine cooped up in there, except they don’t have to bend sardines to get ’em into the tin. How did I get it? I tell you, Jager, I didn’t think I was going to get anything in Besancon. The Lizards just cleaned out every ginger- fresser they could catch.”

“I gather they didn’t catch them all,” Jager said, pointing to the panzer.

“Nobody ever does.” Skorzeny grinned again. “I made contact with one they’d missed. When I showed him all the ginger I had, he said, ‘You just want a rangefinder? I’d give you a whole panzer for that.’ So I took him up on it.”

“But how did you get it out of the city?” Jager asked plaintively.

“There were only two dicey bits,” Skorzeny said with an airy wave. “First was getting me into the vehicle park. We did that in dead of night. Second was seeing if I’d fit into the driver’s compartment. I do, but just barely. After that, I up and drove it away. It steers on the same principles as our machines, but it’s a lot easier to drive: the steering is power assisted and the gearbox shifts automatically.”

“Didn’t any of them challenge you?” Jager said.

“Why should they? If you were a Lizard, you’d never think a human could take off in one of your panzers, now would you?”

“God in heaven, no,” Jager answered honestly. “You’d have to be out of your mind even to dream such a thing.”

“Just what I thought,” Skorzeny agreed. “And just what the Lizards thought, too, evidently. Since they weren’t looking for me to try any such thing, I was able to bring it off right under their snouts. You couldn’t pay me enough to try it twice, though. Next time, they’ll be watching and-” He made a chopping motion with his right hand.

Jager still couldn’t believe the axe hadn’t fallen during this first mad escapade. He nervously glanced up at the sky. If a Lizard plane spotted them now, gunships and fighter-bombers would be on the way here in bare minutes to destroy their own panzer.

As if picking the thought from his head, Skorzeny said, “I’d better move along. I need to get this beast under cover as quick as I can, then arrange to ship it back to Germany so the lads with the high foreheads and the thick glasses can figure out what makes it tick.”

“Can you wait long enough for me to look inside?” Without waiting for an answer, Jager scrambled up onto the upper deck of the fighting compartment and stuck his head through the driver’s hatch. He envied the Lizards the compactness their smaller body size allowed; Skorzeny must have been bent almost double in there.