Upsetting the Balance

“Dumbheaded pigdog!” Jager screamed. The Tiger scored a clean hit. One of the personnel carriers stopped dead, smoke spurting from it. Through the dying reverberations of the cannon shot, Jager heard the crew of the Tiger yelling like drunken idiots. The resemblance didn’t end there, either, he thought bitterly.

He ducked into the turret once more. Before he could speak, Gunther Grillparzer said it for him: “The Lizards know we’re here.”

“Ja.”Jager slapped the gunner on the shoulder. “Good luck. We’ll need it” He spoke to the driver over the intercom. “Listen for my orders, Johannes. We may have to get out of here in a hurry.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberst!”

They were agood crew, probably not quite so fine as the one he’d had in France-Klaus Meinecke had been a genius with a cannon-but damn good. He wondered how much that was going to help them. Exactly what he’d feared was happening. Instead of motoring blithely down the highway toward Breslau and presenting their flanks for close-range killing shots, the Lizard panzers were turning to face his position straight on. Neither a Tiger’s main armament nor a Panther’s could penetrate their glacis plates and turrets at point-blank range, let alone at fifteen hundred meters.

And the personnel carriers were pulling back even farther. He got on the all-panzers circuit: “They know we’re here now. Panzer IVs, concentrate on the carriers.Gott mit uns, we’ll come out of this all right.”Or some of us will, anyhow, he glossed mentally. Some of them wouldn’t.

The Panzer IVs along the line of the ridge opened up, not only with armor-piercing shells to wreck the personnel carriers but also with high-explosive rounds to deal with the Lizards who’d left before being hit. The order was cold-blooded calculation on Jager’s part. The IVs had the weakest cannons and the weakest armor of the machines in the battle group. Not only were they best suited for handling the carriers, they were also the panzers Jager could best afford to lose when the Lizards started shooting back.

He’d hoped the Lizard panzers would come charging up the slope toward his position, cannon blazing. The Russians had made that mistake time and again, and the Lizards more than once. That kind of rush would give his Panther and Tiger crews close-range shots and shots at the Lizards’ side armor, which their cannon could penetrate.

The Lizards were learning, though. Their panzer crews had been through combat, too, and had a notion of what worked. They didn’t need to charge; they could engage at long range. Even at fifteen hundred meters, a hit from one of their monster shells would blow-did blow-the turret right off a Panzer IV and send it blazing into the snow. Jager clenched his fists. With luck, the commander, gunner, and loader there never knew what hit them.

Nor were the armored personnel carriers helpless against panzers. Their light cannon wouldn’t penetrate turret armor, but some of them carried rockets on launch rails on the sides of their turrets. Like the ones the Lizard infantry used, those had no trouble cracking a panzer.

“Retreat!” Jager bawled on the all-hands frequency. “Make them come to us.” The Maybach in the Panther he personally commanded bellowed louder as it stopped idling and went into reverse.

“This’ll be interesting,” Grillparzer shouted up at Jager. “Will we be in our new position before they get up here where we are now and start blasting away at us?”

Interestingwasn’t the word Jager would have used, but it would do. The trouble was, the Lizard panzers were not only better armed and armored than the ones theWehrmacht had, they were faster, too. General Guderian hadn’t been joking when he said a panzer’s engine was as important a weapon as its gun.

A Tiger maybe half a kilometer off to the north of Jager took a hit just as it was about to reach the cover of pine woods. It brewed up spectacularly, with a smoke ring going out through the cupola as if the devil were enjoying a cigar, and then with the ammunition cooking off in a display of orange and red fireworks. Some of the smoke that boiled out of it came from the burning flesh of its five crewmen.

Grillparzer got a decent shot at one of the Lizard panzers, but its armor held the round out of the fighting compartment. A trail of fire appeared from out of a snowdrift, with no Lizard panzers nearby: the Lizard infantry had come up. The rocket hit a Panzer IV in the engine compartment, which burst into flames. Hatches popped open. Men ran for the trees. A couple of them made it. Machine-gun fire cut down the rest.

Voices were screaming in Jager’s earphones: “They’re flanking us,Herr Oberst!” “Two enemy panzers have broken through. If they get in our rear, we’re done for.” “Can you call for reinforcements, sir?”