Very quietly, down to the south, Otto Skorzeny was smuggling an atomic bomb into Lodz. Jager didn’t know just how the SS man and his chums were doing it. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want them to do it, either, but he had no say about that.
He wondered if he’d managed to get word into the city. The fellow he’d contacted didn’t seem nearly so reliable as Karoclass="underline" he was furtive and frightened, half rabbit, half weasel. He was also alive, however, a good reason to prefer him to the late farmer.
Gunther Grillparzer made a disgusted noise. “They aren’t rushing up to skewer themselves on our guns, the way they used to,” he said. “Took ’em long enough to learn, didn’t it? The British were quicker, down in North Africa. Hell, even the Russians were quicker, and that’s saying something.”
Off to the right, a Lizard antipanzer rocket got a Panzer IV between concealed firing positions. It brewed up, flame spurting from every hatch and a perfect black smoke ring shooting out through the open cupola. None of the five crewmen escaped.
Then Lizard artillery started landing around the German panzers. Jager considered that a signal to halt the attack for the day. The Lizards weren’t so prodigal in their use of the special shells that spat mines as they had been when the war was new, but they did still throw them about from time to time. He didn’t care to lose half a company’s worth of panzers to blown tracks.
The men were just as glad to bivouac. As Gunther Grillparzer got a little cookflre going, he turned to Johannes Drucker and asked, “Ever get the feeling you’ve lived too long already?”
“Don’t talk like a dumbhead,” the driver answered. “You just had a goose walk over your grave, that’s all.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Grillparzer said. “I hope so. Jesus, though, every time we fight the Lizards, I don’t believe I’m going to come through in one piece.”
Otto Skorzeny had a way of materializing out of thin air, like a genie from theArabian Nights. “You’re a young man yet,” he said. “One piece a day shouldn’t be enough to satisfy you.”
“I didn’t expect to see you here so soon,” Jager said as the panzer crewmen snickered.
“Hell, don’t give me that-you didn’t expect to see me at all,” Skorzeny said with a laugh. “But I needed to give you the news and I couldn’t very well put it on the wireless, sohier steh’ ich- here I stand.” He struck a pose perhaps meant to be clerical. Jager was hard-pressed to imagine anyone who seemed less like Martin Luther. The SS man nudged him. They walked away from the cookflre and the big, friendly bulk of the Panther. In a low voice, Skorzeny went on, “It’s in place.”
“I figured it had to be,” Jager answered. “Otherwise you’d still be down in Lodz. But how the devil did you manage it?”
“We have our methods,” Skorzeny said, not sounding much like Sherlock Holmes, either. “Enough ginger for the Lizards, enough gold pieces for the Poles.” He laughed. “Some of them may even live to spend their loot-but not many.” Merely being himself, he was as frightening a man as Jager had ever known.
“When does it go off?” he asked.
“When I get orders to touch it off,” Skorzeny said. “Now that it’s in place, all my chums in the fancy black uniforms will go on home. It’ll be my show. And do you know what?” He waited for Jager to shake his head before continuing, “I’m really looking forward to it, too.”
No, he was never more frightening than when he sounded like Skorzeny.
The rubble behind which Mutt Daniels sprawled had once been the chimney to a prosperous farmhouse about halfway between Marblehead and Fall Creek, Illinois. He glanced over to Herman Muldoon, who was sprawled behind some more of those red bricks. “We don’t go forward any way a-tall,” he said, “we don’t clear the Lizards off the Mississippi till the weekafter Judgment Day.”
“Yeah,” Muldoon agreed mournfully. “They don’t much want to be moved, do they?”
“Not hardly,” Mutt said. Everything had gone fine till the U.S. Army tried to push south from Marblehead. They’d gone a couple of miles and stalled. A double handful of Shermans and a few older Lees had supported the attack, too. A couple of the Shermans were still running, but the powers that be had got leery about putting them any place where the Lizards could shoot at them. In a way, Mutt understood that. In another, he didn’t. What point having tanks if you were afraid to use ’em?
Over to his right, behind the burned-out carcass of one of those Lees, a mortar team started lobbing bombs at the Lizard lines a few hundred yards south of the farmhouse.Whump! Whwnp! Whwnp! Those little finned shells didn’t have much in the way of range, but they could throw a lot of explosive and steel fragments in a hurry.
The Lizards wasted no time replying. Mutt hunkered down and dug himself into the ground with his entrenching tool. Those weren’t only mortar bombs whistling in; the Lizards were shooting real cannon, too, and probably from a range at which American guns couldn’t reply.
Under cover of that bombardment, Lizard infantry skittered forward. When Mutt heard the platoon BAR start chattering, he stuck his head up and blazed away with his tommy gun. He didn’t know whether any of the Lizards got hit or not. The BAR might well nail ’em at those ranges, but he’d just be lucky if he wounded one of the aliens. Still, they dove for cover and stopped advancing, which was the point of shooting early and often.
“Haven’t seem ’em try to move up on us in a while,” Muldoon yelled through the din.
“Me neither,” Daniels said. “They been happy enough on the defensive for a while. An’ you know somethin’ else? I was pretty much happy to have ’em that way my own self.”
“Yeah,” Muldoon said. A big shell landed close by a couple of seconds later, showering both men with dirt and leaving them stunned and half deafened.
Mutt glanced back into a foxhole about twenty yards away to make sure his radioman was still in one piece. The kid was still moving and wasn’t screaming, so Daniels figured nothing irreparable had happened to him. He wondered if he was going to have to call for mustard-gas shells to hold the Lizards back.
He was about to yell to the radioman when the Lizards’ barrage let up. He peered suspiciously over the bricks. What sort of trick were they trying to play? Did they think they could catch the Americans all so deep in their holes that they wouldn’t notice attackers till those attackers were in among them? If they didn’t know better than that after more than two years of hard fighting, they damned well should have.
But the Lizards, having tried one advance, weren’t pushing forward again. Small-arms fire from their side of the line had died away, too. “Made their point, I guess,” Mutt said under his breath.
“Hey, Lieutenant, take a gander at that!” Herman Muldoon pointed out toward the Lizards’ lines. Something white was waving on the end of a long stick. “They want a parley or somethin’.”
“Pick up their wounded, mebbe,” Daniels said. “I dickered that kind o’ deal with ’em once or twice. Wouldn’t mind doin’ it again: they make a truce, they keep it for as long as they say they’re gonna.” He raised his voice: “Hold fire, boys! I’m gonna go out there an’ parley with them scaly sons of bitches.” He turned to Muldoon as the Americans’ guns fell silent. “You got anything white, Herman?”
“Still got a snotrag, believe it or not.” Muldoon pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket with no small pride; not many dogfaces could match it these days. It wasn’t very white, but Mutt supposed it would do. He looked around for something to fix it to. When he didn’t find anything, he cussed for a couple of seconds and then stood up, waving the hanky over his head. The Lizards didn’t shoot at him. He walked out into the debatable ground between the two forces. A Lizard holding his own flag of truce came toward him.