Upsetting the Balance

He stood up in the cupola of his Panther. The wind tore at him, even through his reversible parka. He wore it white side out now, to go with the panzer’s whitewashed turret and hull. The machine, large and white and deadly, reminded him of a polar bear as it rumbed east from Breslau. As for the parka, it kept him from freezing. Next to the makeshifts theWehrmacht had used two winters before in Russia, it was a miracle. With it on, he was just cold. That seemed pretty good; he knew all about freezing.

His gunner, a moon-faced corporal named Gunther Grillparzer, said, “Any sign of the Lizards yet, sir?”

“No,” Jager answered, ducking back down inside the turret to talk. “I tell you the truth: I’m just as glad not seeing them.”

“Ach, ja;”Grillparzer said. “I just hope that call from the damned Jews wasn’t a pack of damned moonshine. For all we know, the bastards want to make us motor around and burn up petrol for no reason.”

“They wouldn’t do that.”I hope they wouldn’t do that, Jager added to himself. After what theReich had done to the Jews in Poland, how could he blame them if they wanted revenge? Aloud, he went on, “The commandant seems convinced the call was legitimate.”

“Ja, Herr Oberst,”Grillparzer said, “but those aren’t angels that come out the commandant’s arse when he squats on the WC, are they?”

Jager stood up again without answering. Russians and Lizards-and SSEinsatzgruppe men-followed orders without thinking about them. TheWehrmacht trained its soldiers to show initiative in everything they did-and if that made them less respectful of their superiors than they would have been otherwise, well, you had to take the bad with the good.

They reached the crest of a low rise. “Halt,” Jager told the driver, and then relayed the command to the rest of the panzers in the battle group: anad hoc formation that essentially meant,all the armored vehicles we can scrape together for the moment. “We’ll deploy along this line. Hull down, everyone.”

When a polar bear prowled through ice and snow, it was the most deadly predator in its domain. Foxes and badgers and wolverines stepped aside; seals and reindeer fled for their lives. Jager wished-oh, how he wished! — the same held true for his Panther, and for the Panthers and Panzer IVs and Tigers with it.

Unfortunately, however, in straight-up combat it took anywhere from five to a couple of dozen German panzers to knock out one Lizard machine. That was why he had no intention of meeting the Lizards in straight-up combat if he could possibly help it. Strike from ambush, fall back, hit the Lizards again when they stormed forward to overwhelm the position you’d just evacuated, fall back again-that was how you hurt them.

He wished for a cigarette, or a cigar, or a pipe, or a dip of snuff. He’d never tasted snuff in his life. He just wanted tobacco. There were stories that people had killed themselves when they couldn’t get anything to smoke. He didn’t know if he believed those or not, but he felt the lack.

He had a little flask of schnapps. He took a nip now. It snarled its way down his gullet. It might have been aged half an hour before somebody poured it into a bottle. Then again, it might not have. After he drank, he felt warmer. The doctors said that was nonsense.To hell with the doctors, he thought.

What was that off in the distance? He squinted through swirling snow. No, it wasn’t a horse-drawn wagon: too big and too quick. And there came another behind it, and another. His stomach knotted around the schnapps. Lizard panzers, heading this way. Down into the turret again. He spoke two brief sentences, one to the gunner-“The Jews weren’t lying”-and one to the loader-“Armor-piercing.” He added one more sentence over the wireless for the benefit of the battle group: “Hold fire to within five hundred meters.”

He stuck head and shoulders out into the cold again, raising binoculars to his eyes for a better look. Not just Lizard panzers coming this way, but their personnel carriers, too. That was good news and bad news. The panzers could smash them, but if they disgorged their infantry before they were hit, they were very bad news. Lizard foot soldiers carried antipanzer rockets that madePanzerschrecks look like cheap toys by comparison.

The panzer troops he commanded had plenty of fire discipline,danken Gott dafur. They’d wait as he had ordered, let the Lizards get close and then hit them hard before dropping back to the next ridge line. They’d-

Maybe the crew of the Tiger a few hundred meters away hadn’t been paying attention to the wireless. Maybe their set was broken. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn about fire discipline. The long-barreled 88 roared with the leaders of the Lizard force still a kilometer and a half away.