Upsetting the Balance

Howard was the trooper who’d pushed down the detonator plunger. He said, “I’m on the good guys’ side. Reckon that leaves you out, Maxwell.”

“Let’s see what we’ve done.” Auerbach got up and trotted over to US 40. He nodded in solemn approval. Through swirling dust, he saw they’d blown a crater across both lanes of blacktop. Anybody who sent a tracked vehicle down into it would get his teeth rattled. Nobody would try to send a wheeled vehicle into it-you’d have to go around.

The demolition team finished their job in the area, then became ordinary cavalrymen-turned-foot soldiers like the rest of the company. Auerbach positioned his men on the north side of US 40, although that put the highway between them and their horses. The ground rose toward the low ridge of the Smoky Hills there, and offered better firing positions.

Once the men had dug in, there was nothing to do but wait. He gnawed jerked beef and fidgeted. He hadn’t wanted to blow the road too close to Cheyenne Wells, not least for fear the Lizards there would respond before all his preparations were ready. Now he began to worry that they hadn’t noticed the explosion at all.

Bill Magruder let out a hiss, then said, “Sir, something coming down the road from the east.”

Auerbach peered in that direction. “Something” was a motor vehicle-no, a couple of motor vehicles. That meant they were Lizards, all right. He raised the field glasses to his eyes. The vehicles leaped closer: a couple of armored personnel carriers. He grimaced. He’d hoped for one of those and a truck. Well, you didn’t always get everything you hoped for.

The carriers-he would have thought of them as half-tracks, but the Lizards fully tracked their machines-slowed when they saw the crater ahead. Auerbach kept a wary eye on their turrets. They mounted light cannon, not machine guns like American half-tracks.

A Lizard crawled out of a hatch and went up to the edge of the broken asphalt. No one fired at him. He got back into the machine. Auerbach waited to see what would happen next. If the Lizards decided to wait and send for a road repair crew, a mighty good plan would have gone up in smoke.

After a moment, several Lizards emerged from the lead armored personnel carrier. A couple of them scrambled up onto the deck behind the turret and unshipped a dozer blade, which the others helped them fit to the front of the personnel carrier’s hull. They were going to do a hasty job of road repair themselves. The waiting cavalrymen did not interfere.

The Lizards got back into the carrier. It rolled off onto the soft shoulder of the road. The dozer blade dug in to pick up dirt to fill in the hole in the road. The engine’s note, though quiet to anyone used to American armor, got louder.

Hunkered down behind a tumbleweed, Auerbach bit his lip and waited, fingers crossed. When the explosion came, it wasn’t as loud as the one that had blasted the crater in US 40, but far more satisfying. Antitank mines carried a charge big enough to wreck a Sherman. That didn’t always suffice to take out the tougher Lizard tanks, but it was plenty to ruin an armored personnel carrier. Smoke and flame spurted up from the vehicle, which slewed sideways and stopped, the right track blown off the road wheels.

Hatches flew open. Like popcorn jumping up in a popper, Lizards started bailing out of the stricken machine. Now Auerbach’s cavalry company opened up with almost everything they had. The Lizard infantry men fell, one after another, although a couple made it to the ground unhurt and started shooting back.

The turret of the unhurt Lizard personnel carrier swung north with frightening speed. Both the cannon and machine gun coaxial with it opened up on the machine-gun position the Americans had dug for themselves. No, the Lizards weren’t fools, Auerbach thought as he fired at one of the males who’d succeeded in escaping from his vehicle: they went after the most dangerous enemy weapon first.

Or rather, they went after what theythought was the most dangerous enemy weapon. Auerbach had posted a two-man bazooka crew as close to the road as he dared: about seventy-five yards away. Like antitank mines, bazookas were iffy against Lizard tanks; frontal armor defeated the rockets with ease, while even side or rear hits weren’t guaranteed kills. But the ugly little rocket bombs were more than enough to crack open lesser vehicles.

An American half-track would have become an instant fireball after a bazooka hit The hydrogen fuel the Lizards used was less explosive than gasoline, and they had better firefighting gear than the handheld extinguishers American half-tracks and tanks carried. That helped the Lizards, but not enough. After a couple of heartbeats, the Lizards the bazooka round hadn’t killed or maimed began to try to escape their burning machine.