He whispered something to one of the other young men, who handed Bobby Fiore a grenade. He felt for the pin, found it. Lo held up fingers close to his face-one, two, three. Then he, too, mimed throwing. “Yeah, I know I gotta get rid of it,” Fiore said laconically.
The fellow who’d given him the grenade proved to have three more, which he also passed on. Fiore took them, but less enthusiastically each time. He figured he could throw one, maybe two, and get away in the confusion, but anything after that and he’d be asking to get blown to pieces.
But the Reds weren’t asking him to do anything they weren’t game for themselves. Some of them pulled out pistols from the waistbands of their trousers; Lo and one other fellow had submachine guns instead-not tommy guns like gangsters, but stubbier, lighter weapons of a make Fiore didn’t recognize. He wondered if they were Russian. Any which way, he was glad he hadn’t tried using that baseball bat back in his hut.
Lo started crawling through the field-beans were growing in it, Fiore discovered-toward the Lizard outpost. The other raiders and Fiore trailed after him. The reek of night soil (as poetic a way of saying shit as he’d ever heard) filled his nostrils; the Chinese used it for fertilizer.
The Lizards obviously weren’t expecting trouble from the outside. The humans easily got within fifty yards of their perimeter. Lo looked a question to Bobby Fiore: was this close enough? He nodded. Lo nodded back and thumped him on the shoulder again. For a Chinaman and a Communist, Lo was all right.
The raiders slithered out into a rough skirmish line. Lo stayed close by Fiore. He gave his comrades maybe a minute and a half to find firing position, then pointed to Fiore and then to the guard station.
I get to open the show, huh? It was an honor Fiore could have done without, but nobody’d asked his opinion. He yanked the pin out of one of the grenades, hurled it as if he’d just taken a relay in short right and was trying to nail a runner at the plate. Then he flung himself flat on the stinking ground.
Bang! The blast was oddly disappointing; he’d expected more. But it did what it was supposed to do: it got the Lizards’ attention. Fiore heard hissing shouts, saw motion in and around the guard post.
That was what the Chinese had been waiting for. Their guns opened up with a roar quite satisfyingly loud. Lo went through a whole magazine in what seemed no more than a heartbeat; his submachine gun spat a flame bright and searingly yellow as the sun. He rammed in another clip and started shooting again.
Did the hisses turn to screams? Did Lizards fall, pierced by bullets? Fiore didn’t know for sure. He jumped up and threw another grenade. Its boom added to the cacophony all around.
For somebody who’d never seen action till that moment, he’d gauged it pretty well. No sooner had he hit the dirt again than the Lizards woke up. Searchlights came on. If the muzzle flash from Lo’s submachine gun had been sun-bright, they were like looking at the naked face of God. And the machine guns they opened up with reminded Fiore of God, too, or at least of His wrath. Bobby even wished he were back in the tunnel.
Off to his left, one of the Chinese raiders started screaming and wouldn’t stop. Off to his right, fire from the second submachine gun cut off in the middle of a burst and didn’t start up again. Just over his head, bullets clipped off the tops of growing bean plants like a harvester from hell.
Lo kept right on shooting, which made him either brave or out of his ever-loving mind. Two searchlights swung toward him, which meant that for a moment none was pointing at Bobby Fiore. He threw his third grenade, got down, and started rolling away from where he had been. The location didn’t seem healthy any more.
Lo’s weapon fell silent. Fiore didn’t know whether he was dead or also moving. He kept rolling himself until he fetched up against a long obstruction: a dead Chinese, pistol still in hand. Fiore took it and scuttled away from the Lizard guns. He’d done all the fighting he intended to do today.
He put all the distance he could between himself and that terrible fire. Bullets lashed the plants all around him, kicking up dirt that spattered his hands, his feet, his neck. Somehow, none of the bullets hit him. If Lizard infantry came out after him, he knew he was dead. But the aliens relied on firepower instead, and however awesome it was, it wasn’t perfect-not quite. The last Chinaman stopped shooting and started shrieking.
Alternating Hail Marys with under-his-breath mutters of “Where the fuck’s that tunnel?” Fiore slithered back toward where he thought it was. After a while, he realized he must have gone too far. At the same instant, he also realized he couldn’t possibly go back, not if he wanted to keep on breathing.
“If I can’t get back into camp, that means I better get my ass outta here,” he mumbled. He crawled and scuttled as fast as he could. No searchlights picked hip up as he dodged between rows of beans. Then he tumbled into a muddy ditch or tiny creekbed in the poorly tended field that providentially ran diagonally away from the Lizard guard post. He hoped the Chinese Reds had done some damage there, but was whatever they’d done worth six lives?
He didn’t know. He was damned sure it wasn’t worth seven, though.
After an eternity that might have lasted fifteen minutes, the beans on either side of the ditch gave way to bushes and sapling. About then, a helicopter came rattling over the field and raked it with fire. Dust and pulverized bean plants flew into the sky. The noise was like the end of the world. Bobby Fiore’s teeth chattered in terror. The same sort of flying gun-ships had strafed his train and the fields around it back in Illinois.
After a while, the gunship flew away. It hadn’t lashed the place where Fiore lay trembling. That still didn’t mean he was safe. The farther out of there he got, the better off he’d be. He made himself move even though he shook. He didn’t feel as if he were in a tight baseball game any more. Combat against the Lizards was more like the fly taking on the swatter.
He was altogether alone and on his own. He counted up his assets: he had one grenade, a pistol with an uncertain number of cartridges, and a tiny smattering of Chinese. It didn’t seem like enough.
“Mild bloody climate,” George Bagnall muttered, stamping snow from his boots and brushing it from his shoulders. “Sod Jerome bloody Jones.”
“Not so bad in here,” Ken Embry answered. “Shut the door. You’re letting in the bloody spring.”
“Right.” Bagnall slammed the door with a satisfying crash. He promptly started to sweat, and divested himself of fur cap and leather-and-fur flying suit. As far as he could tell, the Soviet Union in general and Pskov in particular had only two temperatures, too cold and too hot. The wood-burning stove in the corner of the house he and Embry had been assigned was more than capable of keeping it warm: too much more than capable. But none of the windows opened (the notion seemed alien to the Russian mind), and if you let the fire go out, you were facing chilblains again within the hour.
“Want some tea?” Embry asked, pointing to a dented samovar that added its quotient of warmth to the close, tropical air.
“Real tea, by God?” Bagnall demanded eagerly.
“Not likely,” the pilot answered with a sneer. “Same sort of leaves and roots and muck the Bolshies are drinking these days. No milk, either, and no cups, same as always.” The Russians drank tea-and their ersatz, too-from glasses, and used sugar but no milk. Considering that at the moment there was no milk in Pskov, save from nursing mothers and a few officers’ closely guarded cows and goats, the Englishmen had had to get used to it that way, too. Bagnall consoled himself by thinking he was less likely to catch tuberculosis without milk in his tea; the Reds didn’t fret over attestation.