In the Balance полностью

His attention shifted from the tank to the trucks and soldiers it was guarding. The trucks, like any wheeled vehicles, were having a lot of trouble in the mud. The NKVD man back in Moscow had been right; they were unusually heavy. Every so often a Lizard soldier, looking even more alien than usual in a shiny gray suit that covered him from toe claws to crown, would go over and put something-at this distance, Jager couldn’t tell what-into the back of a truck.

I hope we don’t have to hijack a vehicle, he thought. Given the state of what the Russians, for lack of a suitably malodorous word, called roads, he wasn’t sure the band could hijack a Lizard truck.

From a position carefully camouflaged by tall dead grass, a German machine gun began to bark. A couple of Lizards fell. Others started to run, while still others, wiser or more experienced, flattened out on the ground as human soldiers would have done. The glass blew out of a truck’s windshield when a round or two struck home; Jager couldn’t see what happened to the driver.

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.