Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

The commander of the Lizard panzer needed longer to notice the machine gun had opened up than he should have. The Dummkopf had his cupola buttoned up, too; Jager would have demoted a man (to say nothing of blistering his ears and maybe his backside) for a piece of stupidity-or was it cowardice? — like that.

When the Lizard finally deigned to pay some attention to the machine gun nest, he did just what Jager had hoped he would: instead of standing off and annihilating it with a round or two from his cannon, he charged toward it, his own machine gun chattering.

The German weapon fell silent. That worried Jager; if the Lizard got lucky with his own machine gun, the partisan band might have to back off and come up with a new plan. But then the concealed machine gun started up again, now firing straight at the oncoming tank.

Save as a goad, that was useless; Jager watched 7.92mm bullets spark off the Lizard panzer’s invincible front armor and fly away uselessly. The popgun onslaught, though, was intended only as a goad, to make sure the enemy tank commander took the machine-gun nest too seriously to worry about anything else.

Georg Schultz let out a gleeful grunt “God damn me to hell if he isn’t taking the bait, sir.”

“Ja,” Jager answered absently. He watched the panzer slog through the mud until it was just past the edge of the woods. Then its main arnament did speak, a bellow that made Jager’s ears ring. Mud fountained up from just behind the German machine-gun nest, but the weapon kept returning fire.

Jager turned his head to glance over at Max. “Brave men there,” he remarked.

The muzzle of the cannon lowered a centimeter or so, fired again. This time, the machine gun was put out of action-a singularly bloodless term, Jager thought, for haying a couple of men suddenly made into mangled chunks of raw meat.

But Otto Skorzeny was already dashing forward from the birch trees toward the Lizard panzer. The enemy tank commander must have been looking straight through his forward cupola periscope, for he never saw the big SS man pounding toward him from the flank and rear. Muck flying from his boots as he ran, Skorzeny covered the couple of hundred meters out to the panzer in time an Olympic sprinter might have envied.

The big machine started to move just, as he came up on it. He scrambled onto the rear deck, chucked a satchel charge under the overhang of the turret, and dove off headfirst. The charge exploded. The turret jerked as if kicked by a mule. Blue flames spurted from the engine compartment. An escape hatch in the front of the panzer popped open. A Lizard sprang out.

Jager took no notice of the alien enemy. He was watching Skorzeny leg it back toward the shelter of the woods. Then his gaze slid to Max again. “Fuck you, Nazi,” the Jewish partisan repeated. But even he saw that would not do, not by itself. Grudgingly, he added, “That SS bastard isn’t just brave, he’s fucking crazy.”

Since Jager had thought the same thing since he met Skorzeny in Moscow, he declined to argue. Along with everyone else in the band, he grabbed his rifle, got to his feet, and ran toward the Lizards of the salvage crew, shouting at the top of his lungs.

The heavy protective suits made the Lizards slow and awkward. They fell like ninepins. Jager wondered how safe it was for him to be tramping about with no more protection than his helmet, but only for a moment. Getting shot was a much more pressing concern.

“Come on, come on, come on!” he shouted, pointing toward the truck the German machine gun had shot up. It hadn’t moved since. When he got up to it, he found out why: one of the rounds that shattered the windshield had also blown out the back of the driver’s head. The blood and brains splashed over the inside of the cab looked no different from those of a human being similarly killed.

Having made sure the truck driver was in fact dead, Jager hurried around to the rear of the vehicle. The latch there was very much like the one on an earthly truck. The partisans already had it open. Jager peered into the cargo compartment, which was lit by fluorescent tubes that ran from front to back across the ceiling.

The mud-covered little misshapen chunks of metal that lay on the floor of the compartment seemed hardly worth the trouble to which the Lizards had gone to recover them. But they were what the raiders had come to steal: if the Lizards wanted them so badly, they ought to be worth having.

Along with his rifle, Max carried an entrenching tool. He scooped up several of those innocuous-looking muddy lumps, dumped them into a lead-lined wooden box a couple of the other partisans hauled between them. The instant he finished, they slammed on the lid. Three men spoke together. “Let’s get out of here.”

The advice was, to say the least, timely. The Lizards had another panzer off in the distance, maybe a kilometer and a halfaway. It started churning toward them. In the same instant, muzzle flashes sprang from the machine gun on its turret. Bullets cracked past the running men. One of them fell with a groan. Long-range machine-gun fire wasn’t much good for taking out any particular individual, but it could decimate troops caught in the open. Jager had fought on the Somme in 1916. German machine guns then had done a lot worse than decimating the oncoming British.

Unlike those brave but foolish Englishmen a generation before, the partisans were not advancing into barbed-wire entanglements but running for the cover of the woods. They were almost there when one of the men carrying the lead-lined chest threw up his hands and pitched forward onto his face. Jager was only a few meters away. He grabbed the handle the partisan had dropped. The box was astonishingly heavy for its size, but not too heavy to lift. Jager and the Jew on the other side ran on.

The sound of dead leaves scrunching wetly under his feet was one of the loveliest things he’d ever heard: it meant he’d made it into the woods. He and his fellow bearer dodged around tree trunks, trying to take advantage of as much cover as they could.

Behind them, the Lizard panzer kept firing, but it didn’t sound as if it was getting any closer. Jager turned to the partisan beside him. “I think the bastard bogged down.” The Jew nodded. The two men grinned at each other as they hurried away from the tank.

Jager felt surprising confidence build in him. He’d thought of this mission as suicidal ever since the NKVD man proposed it back in Moscow. That hadn’t kept him from taking part; suicidal missions were part of war and, if they served the cause, were often worth attempting. But now he began to think he might actually get away with this one. Then-well, he’d worry about then later. He began to think he’d have a later in which to worry about then.

A whirring thutter in the air brought all his fears flooding back. Knowing it was foolish, knowing it was dangerous, he glanced over his shoulder. The helicopter swelled in the split second he watched it. Its guns started to chatter. Mud wouldn’t slow it down. Left alone, it could hover over the bare-branched woods and lash the raiders with fire until they had to give up their mission.

Wham, wham, wham! From among the trees, a 2-centimeter antiaircraft cannon opened up on the helicopter. With its light mount, designed for mountain warfare, it had made up twenty-seven man-portable loads; Jager had hauled one of them himself. It was a German weapon, served by a German crew: part of the reason the Soviets had been willing to include Wehrmacht men along with their own partisans in this band.

The Lizard helicopter just hung in midair for a moment, as if disbelieving the guerrillas could seriously attack it. It was proof against rifle bullets, but not against the antiaircraft gun’s shells. Jager watched them chew it to pieces, watched chunks of metal fly from it at every hit.