Upsetting the Balance

Skorzeny went on, “We didn’t use gas against the Lizards for the same reason we didn’t use gas against the English: for fear of getting it back in turn. Even if we have better, being on the receiving end of mustard gas wouldn’t have been any fun.”

“You’re right about that,” Jager said wholeheartedly.

“With the Lizards on their island, though, the English stopped worrying about things like that.” Skorzeny chuckled. “What’s the old saying? ‘Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged tomorrow’? Something like that, anyhow. The English must have figured that if they were going down, they wouldn’t go down with any bullets left in the gun. And do you know what, Jager? The Lizards must not have used gas in their own wars, because they don’t have any decent defenses against it.”

“Ah,” Jager said. “So someone has found an Achilles’ heel for them at last, eh?” He had a sudden vision of sweeping the Lizards off the Earth, though he had no idea how much gas it would take to do that, or how many-or how few-people would be left alive after it was done.

“A weak place, anyway,” Skorzeny said. “But they aren’t stupid, any more than the Russians are. Do something to them and they’ll try to figure out how to stop you. They don’t have many masks of their own-maybe they don’t have any; nobody’s sure about that-but they’re sure to have captured English samples by now, and they do have collaborators. There’s a factory in the south of France that’s gearing up to turn out gas masks to fit snouty Lizard faces.”

“A light begins to dawn,” Jager said. “You want something dreadful to happen to this factory.”

“Give the man a cigar!” Skorzeny exclaimed, and from an inner pocket of his tunic he produced a veritable cigar, which he handed to Jager with a flourish. Jager seized it with no less alacrity than he would have accepted the Holy Grail. Now Skorzeny’s grin, though lopsided, seemed genuinely amused. “I know just what I want to happen to the building, too.”

“Do you?” Jager said. “How does it involve me?”

“Think of it as-poetic justice,” Skorzeny answered.

One of Rance Auerbach’s troopers kept singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” over and over again. Auerbach was damn sick of the song. He wanted to tell the cavalryman to shut up, but couldn’t make himself do it. You dumped your worries however you could when you headed into a fight.

And Lydia, Kansas, was where two companies of cavalry were supposed to be going: a tiny, nowhere town on Kansas State Highway 25,a two-lane stretch of nowhere blacktop that paralleled US 83’s north-south path through Kansas a few miles to the west of the federal road, but that petered out well before it reached the Nebraska state line.

Lieutenant Bill Magruder said, “The damned Lizards should have moved into Lydia by now.”

“They’d better have moved into Lydia by now,” Auerbach answered feelingly. “If they haven’t, a lot of us are going to end up dead.” He shook his head. “A lot of us are going to end up dead any which way. Riding horses against the Lizards isn’t your basic low-risk business.”

“Radio traces have been telling ’em right where we’re at ever since we set out from Lamar,” Magruder said with a tight grin. “They should know we’re gettin’ ready to hit Lydia with everything we’ve got.”

“They should, yeah.” Auerbach’s smile was tight, too. The Lizards loved their gadgets, and believed in what those gadgets told them. If they intercepted radio signals that said two companies were heading toward Lydia to try to take it away from them, they’d take that seriously-and be waiting to greet the Americans when they arrived.

But it wasn’t two companies heading toward Lydia: it was just Auerbach’s radioman and half a dozen buddies, plus a lot of horses lashed together and carrying cloth dummies in the saddle. They never would have fooled anybody from the ground, but from the air they looked pretty good. The Lizards used aerial recon the same way they used radio intercepts. If you fed ’em what they already thought they were seeing or hearing, you could fool ’em. They went to Lydia-and you went to Lakin.

Thinking about carrier pigeons and nineteenth- versus twentieth-century warfare had given Auerbach the idea. He’d sold it to Colonel Nordenskold. Now it was his to execute… and if he’d guessed wrong about how the Lizards’ minds worked, they’d do some serious executing of their own.

He held up a leather-gauntleted hand to halt his command when they came to a tall stand of cottonwoods along the banks of the Arkansas River. “We’ll hold horses here,” he ordered. “We’re a little farther out than usual, I know, but we’ve got more horses along, too, since this is a two-company raid. We won’t find better cover for concealing them any closer to town. Mortar crews, machine gunners, and you boys with the bazooka, you’ll bring your animals forward. If we’re lucky, you can use ’em to haul the weapons out when we pull back.”