Skorzeny went on, “We didn’t use gas against the Lizards for the same reason we didn’t use gas against the English: for fear of getting it back in turn. Even if we have better, being on the receiving end of mustard gas wouldn’t have been any fun.”
“You’re right about that,” Jager said wholeheartedly.
“With the Lizards on their island, though, the English stopped worrying about things like that.” Skorzeny chuckled. “What’s the old saying? ‘Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged tomorrow’? Something like that, anyhow. The English must have figured that if they were going down, they wouldn’t go down with any bullets left in the gun. And do you know what, Jager? The Lizards must not have used gas in their own wars, because they don’t have any decent defenses against it.”
“Ah,” Jager said. “So someone has found an Achilles’ heel for them at last, eh?” He had a sudden vision of sweeping the Lizards off the Earth, though he had no idea how much gas it would take to do that, or how many-or how few-people would be left alive after it was done.
“A weak place, anyway,” Skorzeny said. “But they aren’t stupid, any more than the Russians are. Do something to them and they’ll try to figure out how to stop you. They don’t have many masks of their own-maybe they don’t have any; nobody’s sure about that-but they’re sure to have captured English samples by now, and they do have collaborators. There’s a factory in the south of France that’s gearing up to turn out gas masks to fit snouty Lizard faces.”
“A light begins to dawn,” Jager said. “You want something dreadful to happen to this factory.”
“Give the man a cigar!” Skorzeny exclaimed, and from an inner pocket of his tunic he produced a veritable cigar, which he handed to Jager with a flourish. Jager seized it with no less alacrity than he would have accepted the Holy Grail. Now Skorzeny’s grin, though lopsided, seemed genuinely amused. “I know just what I want to happen to the building, too.”
“Do you?” Jager said. “How does it involve me?”
“Think of it as-poetic justice,” Skorzeny answered.
One of Rance Auerbach’s troopers kept singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” over and over again. Auerbach was damn sick of the song. He wanted to tell the cavalryman to shut up, but couldn’t make himself do it. You dumped your worries however you could when you headed into a fight.
And Lydia, Kansas, was where two companies of cavalry were supposed to be going: a tiny, nowhere town on Kansas State Highway 25,a two-lane stretch of nowhere blacktop that paralleled US 83’s north-south path through Kansas a few miles to the west of the federal road, but that petered out well before it reached the Nebraska state line.
Lieutenant Bill Magruder said, “The damned Lizards should have moved into Lydia by now.”
“They’d better have moved into Lydia by now,” Auerbach answered feelingly. “If they haven’t, a lot of us are going to end up dead.” He shook his head. “A lot of us are going to end up dead any which way. Riding horses against the Lizards isn’t your basic low-risk business.”
“Radio traces have been telling ’em right where we’re at ever since we set out from Lamar,” Magruder said with a tight grin. “They should know we’re gettin’ ready to hit Lydia with everything we’ve got.”
“They should, yeah.” Auerbach’s smile was tight, too. The Lizards loved their gadgets, and believed in what those gadgets told them. If they intercepted radio signals that said two companies were heading toward Lydia to try to take it away from them, they’d take that seriously-and be waiting to greet the Americans when they arrived.
But it wasn’t two companies heading toward Lydia: it was just Auerbach’s radioman and half a dozen buddies, plus a lot of horses lashed together and carrying cloth dummies in the saddle. They never would have fooled anybody from the ground, but from the air they looked pretty good. The Lizards used aerial recon the same way they used radio intercepts. If you fed ’em what they already thought they were seeing or hearing, you could fool ’em. They went to Lydia-and you went to Lakin.
Thinking about carrier pigeons and nineteenth- versus twentieth-century warfare had given Auerbach the idea. He’d sold it to Colonel Nordenskold. Now it was his to execute… and if he’d guessed wrong about how the Lizards’ minds worked, they’d do some serious executing of their own.
He held up a leather-gauntleted hand to halt his command when they came to a tall stand of cottonwoods along the banks of the Arkansas River. “We’ll hold horses here,” he ordered. “We’re a little farther out than usual, I know, but we’ve got more horses along, too, since this is a two-company raid. We won’t find better cover for concealing them any closer to town. Mortar crews, machine gunners, and you boys with the bazooka, you’ll bring your animals forward. If we’re lucky, you can use ’em to haul the weapons out when we pull back.”
“If we’re real lucky, we’ll hold the place a while,” Lieutenant Magruder said quietly. Auerbach nodded, grateful the Virginian didn’t trumpet that thought. If everything went perfectly, they might push the Lizard-human frontier a few miles back toward the distant Mississippi and make the push stick. But how often did things go perfectly in war?
He swung himself down from his own horse, tossing the reins to one of the troopers who was staying behind. Only about twenty or twenty-five men would hold horses today; the cottonwoods’ trunks and low branches made convenient tethering points for the animals. He wanted to get as many soldiers into the fight as he could.
The troopers and the packhorses carrying what passed for their heavy firepower spread out into a broad skirmish line as they advanced on Lakin. Some of the sweat that darkened the armpits of Auerbach’s olive-drab tunic had to do with the weather and the hike. Some came from worry-or rather, fear. If the Lizards hadn’t taken the bait and reinforced Lydia at Lakin’s expense, a lot of good young men weren’t going to make it home to Lamar.
Lots of L’s,he thought. if the similarity in names had confused the Lizards, they wouldn’t have reacted as he’d hoped. And if they hadn’t, his two companies were going to get massacred. Then, a few days or a few weeks or a few months from now, some hotshot captain back in Lamar would have some new brilliant idea about how to drive the Lizards out of Lakin. Maybe Colonel Nordenskold would let him try it out-assuming the Lizards weren’t in Lamar by then, or in Denver.
From way off to the left of the advancing skirmish line came a loud, flatbang! and a shriek. “Oh, hell,” Auerbach muttered under his breath. He raised his voice: “They’ve laid some mines since we were here last, boys. Watch where you put your feet.” Not that that would do much good, as he knew only too well.
The Lizards inside Lakin hadn’t been asleep at the switch, either. As soon as that mine went off, a siren in town began to wail. The Kearny County consolidated high school looked like hell from the last time the cavalry had come to call, but the Lizards were still using it for their base. Off in the distance, Auerbach saw little skittering shapes heading for cover. He bit down hard on the inside of his lower lip. He’d counted on being able to get closer to town before his plan started going to pot.
But what you counted on in war and what you got weren’t always the same critter. Sometimes they weren’t even the same kind of critter. A machine gun started chattering in one of the battered high school buildings. Auerbach threw himself flat amid dark green beet tops. He pounded a fist into the dirt. Cries here and there said his command was taking casualties. If they spent the next hour crawling toward Lakin on their bellies, the Lizards would be able to bring back whatever forces they’d moved up to Lydia.
“Tell Schuyler’s mortar crew to take out that machine gun!” he shouted. The man to his left passed on the message. No radios here-they were all part of the simulated attack on Lydia. Now for the first time Auerbach missed them desperately. He shrugged. His great-grandfathers’ C.O.’s had managed to run battles under conditions like these, so he figured he could do it, too, if he had to.